Campbell's victory brings New Zealand to standstill

First a Tiger, now for a few Lions. So New Zealand was saying as the celebrations continued way after the long white cloud had gone to bed last night, in Auckland, in Wellington, in Christchurch, in Hawera, where Michael Campbell was born. Boy, how they danced and haka'd in that small town at the foothills of Mount Taranaki as the inconceivable sank in - a Maori, one of their very own, US Open champion?

First a Tiger, now for a few Lions. So New Zealand was saying as the celebrations continued way after the long white cloud had gone to bed last night, in Auckland, in Wellington, in Christchurch, in Hawera, where Michael Campbell was born. Boy, how they danced and haka'd in that small town at the foothills of Mount Taranaki as the inconceivable sank in - a Maori, one of their very own, US Open champion?

The disbelief had kicked in as soon as Retief Goosen was revealed as human and as Cambo grabbed a lead he never looked likely to lose. By 10am NZ time, Helen Clark, the country's Prime Minister, had suspended Parliament to witness Campbell becoming only the second New Zealander to win a major after Bob Charles's Open in 1963 and whatever business was planned for yesterday afternoon was quickly abandoned as it was in every other trade on the south and north island. Except, of course, the licensing trade.

"This is a triumph of immense skill, determination and perseverance along with great modesty and humility," said Clark, in an address to her partying nation. "It is unquestionably one of New Zealand's greatest sporting achievements." Wrong. "It is the single greatest sporting moment in New Zealand's history," said Steve Williams, Tiger Woods' caddie and up until this week the most famous Kiwi in golf. "It is incredible for a Maori to be on a stage like this."

Indeed, by last night Campbell was on the most famous stage in America- the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway for The Late Show with David Letterman. By this afternoon he will back at his Brighton home with his Australian wife, Julie, helping to keep his two boisterous boys under control - a surreal end to a surreal few days for a 36-year-old who must have given up hope that his potential would be fulfilled.

As Woods put it, as gracious as ever in defeat despite the realisation even an average performance with the putter would have brought a 10th major, "Look at Cambo's career, how he was playing really well and then all of a sudden lost it. He lost his game and had to rebuild it from scratch. He did a fantastic job coming back from a person who was missing cut after cut to a person who is now US Open champion."

The world No 1 shook his head as he uttered those three words, as did everyone who recalled what Campbell had been through. In 1995 at St Andrews, the young Maori had announced his arrival with a shot from the toughest part of the toughest bunker on the toughest hole in golf - the 17th - that Gary Player called "the finest I've ever seen". That took him into the third-round lead of The Open but he fell away to finish third behind John Daly.

And he fell, and he fell, and he fell... all the way out of the world's top 250, so that by 1998 he had lost all his playing privileges and was poised to give up with a persistent wrist injury.

"I felt like an alien had taken over my body," he said. "I remember throwing my golf clubs across my hotel room and thinking 'this is it, it's all over'. I was about to get an axe and chop them up into pieces and sell balls for a living. But my wife stopped me."

Some intervention, as it was by his long-time manager, Andrew Ramsey, who pulled Campbell through yet another slump at the start of this season, in which he missed the first six cuts on the European Tour, and persuaded him to enter the 36-hole qualifier at Walton Heath a fortnight ago. "If it was up to me I wouldn't have been here," laughed Campbell - who moved up from 80th to 23rd in the world rankings. "I think I've knocked the All Blacks off the front page," he said. "You don't know what that means to me - they're my heroes, my people's heroes," he said.