Friday, August 25, 2000
Shhh! Don't disturb the Tiger
By Michael Weinreb
Knight Ridder Newspapers
AKRON, Ohio — It's hard to predict
the contours of crowd behavior.
Sometimes it explodes into absolute chaos,
war paint and Halloween costumes and sprinting, bodies hanging
from tree branches and emitting noises they didn't know their
voice boxes could cobble together.
And sometimes it turns out like Thursday,
Round One of the NEC Invitational at Firestone Country Club, which
rattled with all the thunder and fury of a coin-operated laundry.
So we have nothing to report here. No Tigermania.
No costumes. No live tigers (or camels, or polar bears) set loose
on the fairway. No streakers. The closest that true fanaticism
came to brushing against Tiger Woods Thursday afternoon was the
guy with the Dallas Cowboys tattoo who climbed under an evergreen
tree to watch Woods plunk a shot off a tree on the 18th hole.
Either that, or the woman who appeared to be wearing an entire
bouquet of false fruit on the brim of her hat.
Woods teed off on the first hole Thursday,
the electronic scoreboard paged a woman named Claire to please
call home, some people whooped, some people clapped, some people
stood, someone bought a hamburger with extra mustard, someone
clanged open the door of the portable toilet, someone observed
the preponderance of straw hats, and Tiger made par.
Number of “You da man” screams:
Zero.
Number of security risks: Zero.
Decibel level: Like a Yanni concert.
“I was telling Stevie (Williams, his
caddie) going down to the first hole how quiet the crowd was,”
Woods said. “It was nice, it really was, without anyone screaming
and yelling, someone stretching out their vocal cords. I don't
think I've ever had it too quiet.”
Not lately. Not at all. Last week in Louisville,
Ky., at the PGA Championship, it was like a frat party on every
fairway, noisy and drunk and teeming with Hee-Haw mannerisms.
Woods played the first two rounds with Jack Nicklaus and one time
Nicklaus looked at him and said, “I've never seen anything
like this.”
“Welcome to the PGA Tour,” Woods
said.
“Last week was a bit of a mess, yeah,”
golfer Stuart Appleby said.
But it's always a mess. This is TigerMANIA,
not Tiger Sings With Pavarotti. At Pebble Beach, at the U.S. Open,
a crazy guy ran around wearing a tiger suit and there were about
700 FBI agents spread about (Thursday, three police officers walked
with Tiger) and someone scraped Tiger's name in the sand on the
adjacent beach. At the British Open, there were more streakers
than at MTV's Spring Break.
And then there was Thursday in Akron, Ohio,
during which Tiger appeared more like a moving display of the
Hope Diamond. He walked past. People gaped. He saved par. He made
birdies. People gaped. Sometimes, they were so caught up in the
hues and tones of genius, in wagging their tongues from their
mouths, that they forgot to applaud.
“The public is very good,” said
Spain's Miguel Angel Jimenez, who played with Woods. “They
were very good today.”
Tiger made eagle on the second hole. A baby
snored.
Tiger ate a chocolate bar on the sixth hole.
A child lost his shoe.
And the conversations. You've heard better
dialogue on a telephone answering machine.
Fan No. 1: “He's bigger than I think
he was.”
Fan No. 2: “Yeah. In the shoulders.”
Father to son, wearing Nike hat: “Look
at this. He's using a 60-degree loft wedge.”
Rather presumptuous man, after Tiger nails
shot on 18 off a tree: “He shouldn't have changed his shot.
He was going to hit a low cut in and he changed his mind.”
What is this, the Ken Venturi family reunion?
When did Tigermania become so BORING?
A man named Jerry Mitchell brought a stepladder
Thursday, anticipating strangled galleries, snickering at his
own cleverness. He stood atop it on the 16th hole Thursday, surveying
the expanse of green as Tiger bogeyed. I stood below him. My view
was the same as his, except that he could predict each male fan's
possibility of contracting pattern baldness.
“If I had known it was going to be
like this,” he said, “I might not have even used it.”
Sure, as one police officer assured us,
it was only Thursday. The beginning of the week, the precursor
to the weekend, to the tournament finale, to most people's days
off and rowdy weekend galleries. But this is how quiet it was:
The last time Tiger Woods played a round so hushed, he said, it
was 5:30 in the morning on the eve of the British Open.
But then, maybe this isn't an anomaly. Maybe
Akron, Ohio, is merely more polite than the rest of mankind.
Either that, or Yanni shot a 64 Thursday
afternoon.
(c) 2000, Akron Beacon Journal
(Akron, Ohio).
Visit Akron Beacon Journal Online at http://www.ohio.com/.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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