| AP Sports Headlines |
Sunday, July 21, 2002
By JIM REEVES
c.2001 Fort Worth Star-Telegram
GULLANE, Scotland - There was a point, finally, when even Tiger Woods had to laugh Saturday.
He wanted to cry, but he laughed instead.
He'd finally dropped in a putt for a birdie on No. 17. He thrust both arms into the air and, for the first time all day, flashed his trademark grin.
He turned and happily bumped fists with friend and playing partner Mark O'Meara.
Then, he swept off his cap and bowed with a flourish to the soaked and shattered remnants of the crowd.
But inside? Inside he had to be weeping.
It was Tiger's only red number of the day, his lone, sad birdie.
On a day when the British Open became ... well, the British Open ... Tiger's chances of capturing the third leg of the magical Grand Slam melted amid a flood of seven bogeys and two double bogeys in the cold rain and blustery winds of Muirfield.
Lashed and battered by the storm, Woods staggered to an eye-rubbing, mind-numbing, dream-shattering 81, the worst round of his professional career. At 219, 11 strokes behind leader Ernie Els, he is completely, totally and irrevocably out of contention.
Or at least as out as Tiger Woods can ever be.
The tournament will go on today and somebody will be crowned champion, but it will happen without its No. 1 storyline.
The only way Tiger's day could have been worse was if he'd walked off the 18th green to find Roseanne waiting for him instead of Swedish swimsuit model Elin Nordegren.
"There are too many guys between me and the lead," he conceded, all but waving a white flag. "All I can do 1/8today3/8 is go out there and shoot a low number and see what happens. You never know. It was sure frustrating to put myself this far behind."
Maybe it just wasn't Tiger's destiny to get the Grand Slam this year. Certainly something out of the ordinary seemed to be working against him.
The weather didn't trouble the early starters, but by the time Woods and O'Meara ventured out of the warmth of the clubhouse to tee off at 2:30 in the afternoon, it had descended in all its fury. Yet, as Woods spoke to reporters in the greenside media tent after his round, the rain had stopped, the wind had died and the skies to the north had begun to clear.
Woods wasn't the only golfer taken apart, piece by piece, by the weather, just the most famous. Scores - those red numbers that signify under par - were falling so fast on the leader board, it looked like another stock market plunge. At any moment we half expected Alan Greenspan to show up and make another "hang in there" speech.
There was simply nothing anyone, save Els, could do.
In the face of adversity and pressure he's never faced before, the most implacable competitor in the world fell apart like a Saturday morning duffer.
Tiger clearly didn't want to be there. We didn't want to be there. The weather was so miserable, even the hardy Scot fans were abandoning Muirfield in droves by mid-afternoon, scrambling for the exits like wet rats.
And why not? Mentally and emotionally, at least, the man they'd come to see was long gone by the time he made the turn with a 42 that was visually stunning in its dismal incompetence.
Staring into the teeth of the howling north wind on the first tee, in the land that gave us "Braveheart", Woods' heart wavered. He meekly pushed his first shot into the right rough, a fateful portent of the long afternoon to come.
Maybe he should have painted his face blue, like Mel Gibson's.
Tiger didn't place a tee shot in the fairway until No. 6. He saw rough never before tramped by human feet. He mis-hit iron shots, flubbed trap shots and lipped out easy putts.
You and I do that all the time, but watching Tiger Woods hack it around, considering everything that was at stake, was downright painful.
OK, I confess, I saw just one hole up close and personal. That one was enough to convince me that the day should be called on account ... on account of it being too wet, too windy and too cold for a polar bear, much less a human being. The other 17 holes of this train wreck I watched in macabre fascination on the press center big screen.
Yep, I'm a wuss, but I ain't no dummy. Mentally, Tiger was already snuggled up by a fire, having a glass of wine with Elin anyway. You don't blame him, do you?
"I tried all the way around," Tiger insisted. "I don't bag it. I tried on each and every shot, and that's the best I could have shot. I tried and unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. I hit poor shots on a tough day and that added up to a pretty high number."
Higher than he's ever seen before, but he made no excuses.
"We all understand this is just the way the Open championship is," he said stoically. "The weather is unpredictable and anything can happen and it has happened and I'm sure it will continue to be that way.
"Sometimes you get the end of the draw and sometimes you don't. If you play at the right time, like the guys who played this morning, you're right there in the ball game with a chance to win."
He went through more than a dozen golf gloves, all he had in his bag, he said. Nothing helped. The rain felt like ice.
"I don't know if it was sleet," he said, "but it sure hurt."
Hurt right down to the bone. Hurt so bad that in the end, all he could do was laugh.
And, finally, go sit by the fire with Elin.
There are worse ways to end the day.
|
|
 |
© 1995- The E.W.
Scripps Co. and the Abilene Reporter-News. All Rights Reserved. Site users are subject to our User Agreement. We also have a Privacy Policy. |
