(Image source: San Francisco Examiner )
BY NICK GERHARDT
ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
You're watching multisource sports video news analysis from Newsy.
After 20 years without a major championship, all Darren Clarke needed -- was a little bit of luck.
"Any major championship winner has to have a combination of really solid play and some good fortune, and Darren Clarke had the good fortune part with his luck of the draw: he didn't have to play in the teeth of the weather--although he did have to play in some pretty tough conditions--he struck the ball well all week."
Some athletes have a lucky sock. Darren Clarke? He scored a lucky locker, his caddie tells Yahoo! Sports.
“When we got to St George’s we were given Greg Norman’s locker and we always felt it was meant to be this week…Tom Watson said it could be a lucky locker for us. It made a massive difference...”
To call this win unexpected might be an understatement. Clarke hadn't cracked the final leader board for a decade -- a drought that nearly led him to give golf up entirely, he tells ESPN.
"You know, I've tried and I've tried and I've tried. And as close as I was to getting very annoyed with the game, and fed up with the game, I still kept the belief, and now here I am--the Open Champion."
According to IrishCentral.com, it wasn’t about the locker, or the weather, but what Clarke called a "fairway to heaven."
“As he celebrated with a pint of his beloved Guinness, Clarke admitted he had some help ‘from above’, six years after his wife Heather died of breast cancer.”
Clarke finished ahead of Americans Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson, who shared second place. Americans are now win-less in their past six tries, their longest drought since 1934.
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Transcript by Newsy.
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