It was nothing more than a post-Open Championship vacation with his mother, but there could be no better place than Paris to remind Ryan Gerard how much life has changed in seven months.
Think back to the penultimate week in December when Gerard, a month into his offseason and at No. 57 in the world ranking, flew halfway around the globe to the tiny island of Mauritius for a shot at finishing the year in the top 50 in the world.
He lost in a playoff and moved to No. 46 to secure his trip to the Masters. His flight home included a long layover in Paris, enough time for him to see the Notre Dame cathedral, the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. “Pretty sick,” he said that day.
Gerard opened the year with consecutive runner-up finishes. He earned his way into the U.S. Open and The Open Championship, lost in a playoff at the Memorial and goes into the Wyndham Championship at No. 16 in the FedEx Cup as he looks toward making the Tour Championship.
His mother came over to Royal Birkdale, where Gerard tied for ninth, and they were off to Paris for three days. That’s when Gerard, who doesn’t take much serious outside of his golf, went on a most unusual search to find “the worst statue that I could possibly find.”
“There’s a lot of just random statues,” he said. “In the Louvre there’s a statue of a child choking out a duck, like full, rear-naked choke. So I felt like I found it pretty quickly.”
That would be “Boy with a Goose” by the Greek sculptor Boethus.
It sounded as though his mother, meanwhile, enjoyed herself. She certainly had more time in Paris than Gerard did seven months ago on his way home from Mauritius.
“She thought I was stupid,” Gerard said. “She was appreciating the art, and I was just looking at dumb statues.”
