Saturday, July 21, 2001
'Bite ... bite ... bite!”
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer
LYTHAM ST. ANNES (AP) — Tiger Woods
left another tournament after yet another tough round without
saying a word to reporters. Then again, maybe he was just hoarse
after spending most of Saturday afternoon at the British Open
yelling at his golf ball.
“Bite!” Woods shouted as the swoosh-covered
sphere disappeared in the distance down the second fairway. “Bite
... bite ... bite!”
At No. 6, he tried adding body English to
the plea.
“Get down!” he yelled, stamping
his left foot over and over. “Get down ... get down ... get
down!”
Apparently, the golf ball didn't listen.
On a calm, cloudy day when the field averaged
even-par 71 and the leaderboard was turned nearly upside down,
Woods fought his swing all the way around Royal Lytham & St.
Annes and shot 73. That left him at 212, five strokes behind four
men who weeks ago were only mentioned in the same sentence when
it began this way: “That Alex Cejka, he's no Tiger Woods
... ”
But now there are 27 such names between
Woods and the claret jug he held aloft at St. Andrews last year
on that glorious Sunday when he became the youngest golfer ever
to complete the career Grand Slam.
Whether Woods has a realistic shot at defending
his title remains to be seen. In a two-minute interview with a
tournament official inside the scoring trailer, Woods said he
hoped to shoot a low number in the final round and “see what
happens.”
What happened next, at least, was encouraging.
Woods zoomed past the assembled media in
a cocoon of security guards and went directly to the practice
range, where he hooked up with swing coach Butch Harmon. He began
his routine in a familiar way — the way he learned as a kid
that Jack Nicklaus did — with an 8-iron, then started working
up through the clubs in his bag. But after a few shots with a
mid-iron, Woods reached back and took out the driver that has
been the cause of so much grief in recent weeks.
Here, where Woods hits the driver only three
or four times a round, the failure has spread to just about every
club he uses off the tee. Like Rush Limbaugh, everything is going
right. Through three rounds, Woods ranks 42nd in fairways hit
out of the 70 players in the field. Saturday, he hit one tee shot
underneath a grandstand, and another so far right that after taking
a penalty drop, he pitched back over the gallery because moving
that many people back behind the ball would have been too much
work.
Not surprisingly, the first four swings
with the driver on the practice range produced banana-shaped drives
that threatened to leave the range. Woods' fifth, though, bored
through the air arrow-straight, and continued that way as Harmon
occasionally paused to adjust the position of Woods' wrists at
the top of the backswing.
Perhaps even less surprising, that was the
same adjustment the two worked on at the end of 1997. That season,
Woods won the Masters in spectacular fashion. But he couldn't
overcome a handful of double- and triple-bogeys at the other three
majors, and after a drought extending through the end of the year,
Woods and Harmon worked to tighten up his swing.
It's a tribute to all that work that Woods
has made only one double bogey at Royal Lytham, with its 196 bunkers
and punishing rough. On the other hand, by Woods' own unrealistic
expectations, he's in something of a slump. The last time he went
three straight tournaments without a top-10 finish was two years
ago. If he finishes out of the top 10 at the British Open, it
will mark the first time he's done so in four straight since the
end of the 1997 season.
At least Woods' demeanor appears to be improving.
During a tough opening round at the Western Open in suburban Chicago,
his last tournament before crossing the Atlantic, Woods hurled
the occasional curse under his breath, flung clubs toward his
bag after bad shots and even broke one in two after dumping an
approach shot at the 18th into a pond.
He blew off reporters after that round as
well. But there, just like here after a 48-minute practice session,
Woods was gracious enough afterward to sign a few autographs.
The real shame is that the day started so
promisingly. Woods went out four strokes off the lead and with
good buddy Mark O'Meara as his playing partner and made three
birdies in the first six holes. But at the par-5 seventh, where
he could have picked up another birdie, a horrible tee shot into
the right rough cost him a double-bogey and he struggled the rest
of the way to the clubhouse.
“We needed our golf carts today so
we could have got that over quicker,” O'Meara said afterward.
“I felt bad for Tiger. He's not where he'd like to have it.”
Asked whether the two talked during the
round, he grinned.
“A little bit. There wasn't that much
because he was hitting some wayward shots out there,” O'Meara
said, “for him.”
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