BETHESDA, MD. – With the late-afternoon sun beating down, only a few stragglers remained on the range Wednesday at Congressional County Club.
On the far side of the tee, a player went about his work under the steady eye of his coach.
“Is that Sean Foley?” one of the remaining spectators said as a small crowd formed.
Indeed it was the now-famous Canadian golf instructor.
“Who is the guy he’s watching?” another spectator asked, the name boards on the tee boxes having been put away for the evening. “Jason Day?”
“I can tell it’s a pro by the way he’s hitting it,” another spectator guessed, correctly.
The player in question was Oshawa’s Jon Mills, standing in the shadow of his teacher.
It was an often laborious three hour and 47 minute affair that featured 11 pitchers, some boneheaded plays, and a huge walk-off home run by Adam Lind that won it for the Toronto Blue Jays in 12 innings.
For Toronto manager John Farrell, who had to parade a total of five relievers into the game before the 6-5 verdict was reached over the Baltimore Orioles at Rogers Centre on Tuesday night, it was all worth it in the end.
“Winning a Major League Baseball game is not that easy,” said Farrell, who should know.
His Blue Jays came into the contest losers of four in a row, including three to the division-leading Boston Red Sox who outscored Toronto 35-5 over the weekend set in Toronto.
The Blue Jays had an off-day on Monday and had plenty of time to try to sooth their ravaged baseball souls after the Boston shellacking, or so the thinking went.
And when Lind stroked his home run to right field leading off the 12th inning off Baltimore reliever Koji Uehara to finally win it for Toronto, it must have been a huge lift of the team’s collective backs, right?
“They way we won tonight I thought was great,” said Lind, who now has 12 home runs on the year. “Any win
Mark Lewis-Francis believes that Usain Bolt is beatable and that his own injury nightmare will help him in his quest to catch the fastest man on the planet.
The 28-year-old Briton’s career has been plagued by injuries and he has only recently returned from his latest setback, a grade-three tear in his groin.
Lewis-Francis had been told to forget about jogging for at least 12 weeks but was back to full training after just eight weeks and, now back in competitive action, is raring to make up for lost time and catch the world’s elite.
The Berkshire-based sprinter spent time with Bolt at a competition in Ostrava, in the Czech Republic, two weeks ago but, while the 100m record holder was winning the elite 100m, Lewis-Francis was competing in the ‘B’ final, which he won in a time of 10.2 seconds.
Despite that, he is confident he has the ability to take on the world’s best this season and in the Olympic year in 2012.
He said: “Usain Bolt is an unbelievable talent and is beatable.
The last time the US Open was held at Congressional Country Club the winner was Ernie Els. The year was 1997 and the South African’s victory around one of the most brutally taxing golf courses in the world provoked just one question; how many more majors would he win? Five? Six? Ten? “I thought I could win eight,” Els concedes.
He carried the aura of endless possibility back in those days, which makes it all the more shocking he managed only one more major victory since then, the 2002 Open Championship at Muirfield.