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BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- The irony was piled high, nearly as tall as the player himself, which is saying something when you stand 6-feet-5 and are considered the biggest man on golf's many professional tours.
No longer on a strange, meandering and occasionally comical voyage of self-discovery, lanky Swedish star Robert Karlsson might finally be discovered by the rest of us.
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| Robert Karlsson finds the range for six birdies in a 10-hole run. (AP) |
You could win some pretzels and beer with this bar bet: Who is the only player to have finished in the top 10 at all three major championships in 2008?
"But Tiger Woods hasn't played them all, has he?" Karlsson said.
Karlsson is becoming nearly as hard to miss, which, until this year, mostly related to his height as far as American fans were concerned. The general stereotype is that Swedes aren't the flashiest and most extroverted of folks, that they skew toward quiet conservatism (think: Annika Sorenstam) and stoically go about their business, minus much panache.
That might be the case for the other eight Swedes in the field at the season's final major, but the eminently likeable Karlsson, as it turns out, might be the nation's most off-the-wall export since Jesper Parnevik.
We mean this as respectfully as possible, but it appears that for much of his career, the inner workings of Karlsson's brain featured far more squirrels than treadmills.
"For a long time, I thought I could get better from looking at things from the outside, trying different techniques, whatever it could be," he said. "I didn't see how I could get to my potential, because I felt I was better than I was playing. I was just looking in the wrong place."
Three years ago, he began working with a Swedish counselor named Annchristine Lundstrom, who began teaching him the solution to many of his perceived weaknesses and foibles could be found by looking inwardly. Sounds reasonable, if not solely because he was running out of external places to explore.
Finding his stride as a player, he leads the European Tour in scoring average and clinched the 2006 Ryder Cup for the Europeans at the K Club. He stands second on the Ryder Cup points list, even tough he hasn't won anything since 2006.
How's that, exactly? He's in the midst of career-best run of consistency -- he has made 24 consecutive worldwide cuts and has 10 top eight finishes in that stretch -- that makes all the Zen-like search for inner calm (and a decent putting stroke) seem all the more laughable. Someday, when he's retired, he's going to look back at his occasionally bizarre career and laugh.
As for us, why wait?
