Sunday, June 18, 2000
Tiger dares to be great
By Bill Lyon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — The ocean winds
were lathering the cliffs of Stillwater Cove with white foam,
and the best golfer in the world was teetering on the lip of a
bunker filled with sand and menace and double bogeys, straining
to balance himself on one leg, like a stork on a high wire.
The golf ball belonging to Tiger Woods was
ensnarled in a tangle of something tall, thick and treacherous,
something that hung in a bushy clump over the bunker, like the
devil's mustache. The sea grass bobbed and danced in the wind
and seemed to howl taunts: Brace yourself, Big Boy, here comes
another 7.
So of course he made birdie.
Somehow he settled himself into that stork
stance and manufactured a shot of pure brilliance, not just gouging
the ball out but propelling it the better part of 75 yards, up
onto the green, eight feet past the cup. The putt, even though
a sidehill slider, was mere formality.
Tiger Woods doesn't just escape, he attacks.
Suddenly, a 7 had become a 4.
Houdini, with a wedge.
Tiger Woods lingered there in the bunker,
permitting himself a small smile, a maestro allowing a fleeting
moment of self-congratulation. He looked sideways at his caddie,
as though to say, “You know, sometimes I even amaze myself.”
And they slapped high-fives.
It was one more validation of what we have
suspected — Tiger Woods has all the shots in the book and
in the bag, and several that aren't. What separates him is, he
also has shots that exist only in his imagination.
Our best athletes always have been the ones
who could improvise in moments of excruciating duress. Tiger Woods
can't turn water into wine, but he sure does have a way of converting
double bogeys into birdies.
In the third round of the United States
Open yesterday, Tiger Woods took the scenic route around Pebble
Beach. Every time you looked up he was trying to shake off a wrist
stinger after hitting a rock, or trying to chop through a thicket
or play off the side of a cliff or get up and down from off an
otter's fuzzy tummy.
It wasn't so much that he was wild; it was
that the Pacific took a deep inhale and then puffed out a series
of gusts in Pebble's direction. Tailwinds became headwinds, crosswinds
made U-turns, sometimes at the top of your backswing.
It was a day in which it was easy to just
curl up in the corner and alibi a feel-sorry-for-yourself 79.
Tiger Woods shot a third-round 71 and spit
into the wind all day long.
Jack Nicklaus had stopped in mid-conversation
the other day and asked: “There's a mill pond again, isn't
there?”
He meant a sudden quiet, a stillness, had
settled in. The implication was that Tiger Woods was about to
tee off and even nature was respectfully genuflecting.
“They always used to say the wind stopped
for 1/8Ben3/8 Hogan,” Nicklaus said. “Now it stops for
Tiger.”
It used to stop for Jack, too. Or so they
said. But it didn't stop for Tiger yesterday. It blew, and it
blew away everyone else. Which is what he wanted, which is what
the great ones always want. Only the brave, the persistent and
the resilient can endure when the conditions toughen.
Of all the numbers linked to Tiger Woods,
here is the most meaningful: 32 percent.
On the very next hole after he has made
bogey or worse, Tiger Woods makes birdie 32 percent of the time.
That is astounding. That speaks to his resilience and his incredible
mental toughness. For almost all of us, and for a lot of pros
as well, a double leads to a triple, followed by a 9.
But he is able to gather himself, to scrub
that from his memory, and start fresh.
At the par-4 No. 3 yesterday, he made a
triple bogey. To yourself, you wondered: When do you suppose was
the last time he had to write down a 7 on his card?
How crippling that must have been to his
emotional state. And yet over the next four holes he went par-par-birdie-birdie.
It became obvious yesterday that Tiger Woods
was, is, the only opponent Tiger Woods need fear. The rest of
the field has conceded. The rest of the field is playing like
this is the U.S. Open; they're out there plugging for par, and
failing.
Tiger Woods is playing a different course,
a different tournament. If it was going to get interesting, it
would be up to him.
He had to come out early yesterday to finish
the final one-third of his second round. Nightfall had stopped
him after the 12th hole, on Friday.
It made a surreal scene. The street lights
winked on and then the soft glow of lamps from inside the magnificent
homes along the golf course bathed Pebble in spun gold. On a patio
just off the 12th green, guests at a dinner party came out to
watch Tiger Woods. It was a scene out of “The Great Gatsby.
He snaked in a 30-foot putt, for birdie.
They clapped, and then returned to their dinner. Tiger packed
up and went home, to bed.
He was up at 4:30 a.m. yesterday, came back,
played the remaining six holes, shooting 69 to go with his opening
65, and then he went back home.
Seven hours after he finished Round 2 he
was teeing off for Round 3. It is not an easy thing, to gear up,
play, gear down, then gear back up and play again.
In the tournament for your country's national
championship.
Which you are leading.
When he came to the finishing hole of Round
2, he hooked his tee ball into the ocean, and the amplifying microphone
there caught for posterity Tiger Woods addressing his drowning
golf ball with a five-word sentence, of which three words were
obscene.
Gee. Golf and profanity. Imagine that.
P.S. The announcers on TV said, with great
assurance, that Tiger would surely play it safe now after hitting
his driver into the Pacific. Surely he would hit an iron off the
tee. So of course he reloaded his driver and crushed the tee ball.
A good, solid, acceptable recovery score
after driving into the ocean off the 18th tee at Pebble is a 7.
Tiger made 6.
And very nearly 5.
The greater the peril, the better his play.
The best thing about him is, he dares. He
dares.
(c) 2000, The Philadelphia
Inquirer.
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