Sunday, June 17, 2001
Tiger caged; the run is done
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The run is done.
Not officially, of course. There is still
Sunday. But Tiger Woods is nine strokes out of the lead heading
into the final round of a U.S. Open he will not win. And for those
of you who complained his domination of the majors was ruining
golf, we have two words: Stewart Cink.
And two more: Retief Goosen.
That's who was sharing the lead the tournament
when the third round ended Saturday.
Now, Cink is a good enough story. He's won
twice in four years on the PGA Tour. He's a squeaky-clean, 28-year-old
who had three All-America team selections and a family in tow
before he left college. Fellow pros call him a thinking man's
golfer, the kind of player who thrives on the precision demanded
by a U.S. Open setup.
Goosen is not a bad story, either. He's
a 32-year-old South African who got hit by lightning as a teen-ager
and fought his way back to health and a spot on the European PGA
Tour. Three years ago, he battled Woods all the way to the 18th
hole of the Match Play Championship before bowing out.
But try loading the entire weight of a sport
on Cink's shoulders, or Goosen's — or both, even — and
see how far it gets.
Golf needs Woods and his charisma in the
middle of things Sunday, not as a warmup act who's off the stage
by the time the bright lights are heating up. So does NBC, CBS,
ABC and the PGA Tour, who will sit down across a bargaining table
soon to come up with a number on a TV rights package.
Golf can survive Woods losing a major —
he's won four straight, after all, and five of the last six —
but not falling out of contention entirely. Cool as it would be
if another young gunslinger like Phil Mickelson, David Duval or
Sergio Garcia broke through at Southern Hills to claim a first
major, not having to duel Woods would rub some of the luster off
the trophy.
It would feel more like winning the Canon
Greater Hartford Open or the Slaley Hall Challenge, tournaments
that Cink and Goosen captured without Woods in contention —
but only because Tiger has never played either event.
Just about anybody else would be cooked
at nine strokes back on a tough Southern Hills track. And some
of Woods' opponents are bold enough to suggest Woods might be,
too. They've seen more misfired shots from him in three rounds
than a season's worth of Shaquille O'Neal free-throws.
“He's been missing a lot of fairways
and when Tiger is right, he can hit fairways that are 10 yards
wide,” Scott Hoch said.
Yet here's the scary part: Give or take
a foot either way, and Woods would be close enough to the top
of the leaderboard to make the prediction business way too risky.
He shot 69 in the third round, offsetting
three bogeys with a quartet of birdies, and his card could very
easily have read 64.
At the second hole, his 30-foot try for
birdie slid by the hole close enough to tempt Woods to raise the
putter toward his lips and take a bite out of the steel shaft.
At No. 3, a 25-foot birdie fell into the cup on the left side
and popped out on the right. At No. 4, a curling, left-to-right
birdie putt that took forever to slither 20 feet, slid past the
hole on the left by an inch. Similar scenes played out at Nos.
15, 16 and 18, interrupted only by a 12-foot birdie try at 16
that somehow fell into the heart of the cup.
“I hit a lot of good shots today, and
I hit so many beautiful putts that didn't go in, they were just
grazing the edge,” Woods said. “That's just the way
it is.
“I watched some of the coverage and
a lot of the guys are doing that, too. They're just missing on
the edges.”
Another thing that Woods and most of those
other guys have in common is that they all believe he can still
win. Never mind that the largest final-round deficit ever made
up in the final round of a U.S. Open is seven strokes, a neat
trick Arnold Palmer pulled to steal the tournament in 1960.
“If I go out there and play a good,
solid round tomorrow,” Woods said, “you never know.”
No, but we can venture a guess. Tiger has
hit more fairways and greens with each round, and lowered the
number of putts he's needed.
“Anybody within 10 shots of the lead
can still win the tournament,” Woods said.
For once, though, he didn't sound convinced,
and he's no longer the only one.
Mickelson, 3-under and poised to make a
run Sunday, was asked whether he thought Woods had a chance.
“I guess everybody at 4-over has a
chance,” he joked.
Then, along with everybody else, he laughed
a nervous laugh.
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