This Week at WorldGolf.com: June 14, 2006
Australians' perfection means U.S. Open,
and World Cup triumphs are ahead
There are two types of people who inhabit this planet. One type is the Australians, with the other being the rest of us poor sods.
Australians, who are born with long blonde hair, the ability to surf and six-packs (figuratively and literally), have long annoyed the world with their nifty accents, adventurous attitudes and brilliant looks. And things are only getting better.
Now, as if to further exasperate us bad-accented, ho-hum-attitude and mediocre-looking non-Australians, the Aussies are on a serious roll in the world of sport.
Being that Australians are great at everything, they are obviously outstanding athletes. There just aren't that many of them, and they tend to concentrate on sports they made up themselves, like Australian Rules Football, which was named such to avoid any threat of the Chinese swooping in and saying they invented it.
But since the Socceroos made Australian history by scoring the nation's first three World Cup goals - in rapid succession - to beat Japan, it now seems that anything is possible for these Super People.
Which is why I predict two great things for the Australians: Their soccer team will advance to the final 16 of the World Cup, and an Aussie will win the U.S. Open at Winged Foot.
An Australian has not won a major in more than a decade, when Steve Elkington won the PGA Championship in 1995. With a relentless success on the PGA Tour this year, Australians have set the stage for one of their number to take home a big prize in 2006, and one of them will do it.
No one can argue that the talent isn't there. Stuart Appleby, Geoff Ogilvy, Adam Scott, Rod Pampling and Aaron Baddeley have all experienced success and any one of them could make the U.S. Open their own personal playground.
At the World Cup, the Aussies will stun Croatia to guarantee the right to advance to the knock-out rounds. At the U.S. Open, an Aussie will knock out the storybook possibilities of a Tiger Woods victory and take the title home to Australia.
And we'll all have two more reasons to seethe with jealousy over those irritatingly perfect Australians.