Monday, July 24, 2000
A clinic in course management
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland (AP) — The question was whether Tiger
Woods wound up in a bunker even once over the course of 72 holes.
“I was in the bunker every day I've been here,” he laughed,
“but it was on the practice green.”
The smile of satisfaction writ large across Woods' face was reflected
in the silver claret jug that sat by his side. It wasn't just
possessing the trophy that mattered, but how Woods came by it.
He ran a clinic in course management.
The game within the game is what always inspired him. It drove
Woods when the competition couldn't and prize money wouldn't,
past one benchmark after another and finally, Sunday, into history.
“He was always taught to play the golf course,” Earl
Woods said from his home in California. “I told him, 'Just
beat the golf course. Everything else will take care of itself.'”
That worked when Tiger was 41/2 and playing against Earl, swinging
a cut-down club and learning to carve his tee shot around the
front bunker of a hole that measured less than 100 yards.
Twenty years later, it works still. Woods hits the ball farther
than anyone else, and he plays against the best over the grandest
venues.
But this much hasn't changed: Put a club in his hands and a golf
course in front of him, and like any artist, he comes up with
a different way of looking at the world. The difference in Woods'
case is that his canvases are fixed points on the globe.
The first one was the Heartwell Golf Course, a scruffy par-3 muni
in Long Beach, Calif., where his first teaching pro, Rudy Duran,
remembers a little kid so gifted he described him as a “shrunken-down
Jack Nicklaus.”
The latest was the Old Course at St. Andrews. There, alongside
the North Sea, Woods was compared favorably to Nicklaus once again,
this time because he won the British Open to complete a career
Grand Slam two years earlier than the master — with a score
never seen in major championship golf.
And when someone asked whether he could get better, Woods did
not flinch.
“No doubt about it,” he said.
All week long, Woods talked about the routes he and coach Butch
Harmon mapped out to attack the course so that even his misses
would steer clear of the gaping bunkers and the narrow burns that
claimed a piece of everyone else.
By the end, he'd made just three bogeys total. The only time he
faced real danger was Friday, when his approach shot on the Road
Hole ran by the flag and stopped on a sun-baked strip of turf
between the green and the road just behind. What followed was
the most magical shot of the tournament.
Woods' chip shot ran back past the flag and up the steep bank
of the bunker — then trickled back down the slope to 8 feet
of the flag. Then he calmly holed the double-breaking putt to
save par.
People rushed to compare it to the handiwork of Seve Ballesteros,
another Open champion regarded as one of the best shotmakers ever.
Woods hates to ruin a good story, but he admitted right away that
the shot was the result more of perspiration than inspiration.
He had practiced it at least a half-dozen times before the tournament
ever began, anticipating exactly what happened.
That should surprise no one. Woods never pulls the trigger before
he's ready. Those qualities — imagination, preparation and
near-flawless execution — are the hallmarks of his game.
They have been since he was small.
That's what Rudy Duran, Woods' first teaching pro, remembered
almost 20 years after watching his prodigy find a way to get past
the bunker on the third hole at Heartwell. “It was frustrating
for him,” Duran said, “but it was also a good learning
experience. He was introduced to strategy on that hole. It was
like an artist with a tool, carving something.”
Tiger took that lesson and ran with it. So much so that as Earl
Woods watched his son bend the Old Course to his will, he recalled
a story. Even though kids younger than 10 weren't supposed to
play the Navy Golf Course, he routinely went around with his son
at his side. At No. 2, Tiger's drive found trouble.
“He was 7 and I told him, 'Tiger, I'm going to make two contributions
to your golf career — mental toughness and course management.
And I'll never forget this — he asked, 'Daddy, What's course
management?'
“He was behind a big clump of trees and he could see the
flag beneath the trees. I asked, 'What are you going to do?'
“He said, 'I can't hit it over the trees, because they're
too tall. I could hit it beneath the trees, but there's a big
bunker there.'
Finally, he said, 'I can hit it out on the fairway, then hit the
ball on the green and one-putt for par.'
“I turned to him and said, 'Tiger, that's course management,'”
Earl paused, “and he just said, 'Oh.'”
———
Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated
Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org
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