| AP Sports Headlines |
Sunday, July 21, 2002
By BOB RYAN
c.2002 The Boston Globe
GULLANE, Scotland - These are words not one member of the international press thought he or she would ever write, at least not until the man in question would, in the year 2057, be shooting his age:
Tiger Woods shot an 81.
It was definitely an 81 kind of day. There were 10 scores of 80 or higher on this day when The Open finally acted like the British Open. We had rain. We had wind. We had weather. La Costa it wasn't. It had 80-something written all over it - for mortals.
But Tiger?
"I tried all day," he said. "I kept grinding it out, and thank God I was grinding because it could have been really a higher number."
That sounds like a throwaway line until you consider that Colin Montgomerie and Lee Janzen each shot 84.
Tiger is normally immune to weather, or distractions of any kind. Most of the time, Tiger is the King of Bad Weather. One month ago Tiger put away the US Open with a casual second-round 68 in the cold rain at Bethpage. Everyone else bitched and moaned. Tiger doggedly slogged through the rain to ensure a major.
If you ask Tiger, however, he'd say that Bethpage on that Friday was Acapulco when matched up with Muirfield Saturday. "No comparison," Tiger insisted.
"I'm sure the Scottish people were really enjoying this today," observed Ernie Els, the gentlemanly South African. "They were probably laughing. They probably play in this 80 percent of the time."
Don't be so foolish as to even ask if this is a Tiger Woods professional high. I mean, what do you think? The previous worst was a 79 he shot in the 1996 Holden Australian Open soon after he began playing for cash. (Earlier that year he shot an 81 as an amateur at the Scottish Open.) For Tiger, a really bad day is 73. He had only been as high as 78 once in the last three years. In his six-year professional career he had shot worse than 75 only 12 times, and he had never been higher than 8 over par. His 42-39-81 Saturday brought him in at 10 over par. His current tournament placement is irrelevant. He sits at 219, 6 over, and that is 11 strokes behind tournament leader Els. There will be no golfing Grand Slam in the year 2002.
This was a Tiger few have ever seen. His trip to Muirfield Hades began with a drive into the right rough that led to a bogey on No. 1 and the journey remained torturous for him right up to his 80th shot, a 4-foot putt that lipped out to deprive him of a birdie-birdie finish.
Aside from the occasional fist pumps in moments of glee, Tiger is not normally given to theatrics, and Lord knows he is not known for his sense of humor. But such was the totality of his four-hour humiliation that when he sank a birdie putt on 17 he first raised his arms in mock salute before removing his cap and bowing to the crowd. How very un-Tigerish.
"Finally," he would later say. "I didn't get shut out, at least. At least I made one birdie today."
So what was Tiger's problem? Actually, what wasn't? He missed the fairways (or, in case of the par 3s, the greens) on 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, and that's when I stopped counting. You cannot play from the rough on this course and expect to make par, and that was at least quadrupledly truer on a day when the conditions were so trying that 49-year-old Irishman Des Smyth, who has seen everything imaginable on the European Tour, said, "The weather conditions were as bad as I ever remember."
Getting to the greens was difficult enough, but once he got there Tiger was unable to make a decent putt for the third straight day. He really hadn't been playing acceptable Tiger golf the first two days (somehow managing to go 4 under because, well, because he is Tiger Woods), and not all his problems were weather-related. In this tournament, par won't cut it, and Tiger has spent three days missing birdie putts.
Anyone who thinks Tiger gets a disproportionate share of the breaks in normal times must have been enormously gratified when the weather changed dramatically about a half-hour prior to his 2:30 p.m. tee time. Those fortunate enough to play in the morning had seen the sun. Those playing from midafternoon on were subjected to Muirfield at its fiendish best.
There were approximately a dozen groups forced to play at least three-quarters of their round in these challenging conditions. But anyone who had started as far back as 11 o'clock or so had to deal with it to some degree. Club selections were laughable. Sergio Garcia talked of not reaching No. 10 with a well-stroked drive/3-wood combo after using a 7-iron on previous trips. Jeff Maggert failed to reach the 213-yard fourth using a driver. Tiger talked of "ripping" a 5-iron 135 yards on one hole. It's understandable why Garcia equated his level-par (that's the way it's said here) 71 to a 65 or why Els felt his 72 was as satisfying as Friday's 66.
Some people did score well, but Tiger Woods was not one of them. After watching him spray drives, miss putts, and once even fail to get out of a sadistic Muirfield bunker, we can safely pronounce him human. Tiger Woods had to endure the unspeakable humiliation of signing a scoreboard attesting to a round that consisted of 1 birdie, 8 pars, 7 bogeys, and 2 double bogeys.
This was sports history. We pricked Tiger Woods in a golfing sense and we watched him bleed.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com
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