Wednesday, August 30, 2000
No one has dominated like Woods
By Skip Bayless
Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
It feels almost as if we've finally encountered a superior life
form from another universe. What he's doing is—or was—impossible.
It's as if he isn't governed by the Earth's gravity or the human
psyche.
He hits UFOs off the tee. He putts telepathically. He has achieved
the inhuman capacity of instant negative memory loss.
I would have bet my most cherished possession—an original
T.P. Mills putter—that this would have happened in any sport
but golf.
I'd sooner have believed I'd see a running back so strong and
elusive that he scored every time he touched the ball ... or a
hitter with such superior hand-eye coordination that he routinely
hit .500 ... or an 8-foot center with guard skills who averaged
50-plus points a game.
I would have lost my T.P. Mills betting against what Tiger Woods
has done to the world's hardest game. He didn't make ESPN's list
of the 50 greatest athletes of the last century. But if voting
were taken today, he'd probably be top 10, maybe even top five.
After all, the athlete voted No. 1, Michael Jordan, recently admitted
that after a year of concentrating on golf he has accepted he's
a “hacker.” So if the “greatest athlete” still
struggles to break 80, how is Woods dominating golf far more convincingly
than Michael dominated basketball?
Move over, Secretariat. Not even that equine freak of nature had
a more phenomenal stretch than Woods has. Montana never rose above
his game the way Woods has. Neither did Ruth nor Ali at their
greatest.
Obviously Woods' next trick will have to be dominating for decades,
as Jack Nicklaus did. Now I wouldn't bet against him. If Jordan
won six championships in nine years, Woods should shoot for seven
U.S. Opens in 10 years, right? Even for Nicklaus in his prime,
that would have been an absurd goal.
For God's sake, this is golf, which long has haunted even its
greatest players. As Jordan will tell you, the degree of difficulty
from basketball to golf rises almost mystically. Anyone who has
tried playing this game on any level knows how quickly and inexplicably
it can come and go, from the driver to the putter. When it goes,
you have no Scottie Pippen to take the pressure off.
I once asked Martina Navratilova, perhaps the greatest female
athlete ever, why she didn't try pro golf. While dominating tennis,
she was a scratch golfer.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Golf's too hard—the
ball's too little, the hole too small. You can come much closer
to mastering tennis.”
In 1975 I was assigned a Monday story about why Nicklaus—at
his peak—had shot something like 82 in the final round of
Pebble Beach's Bing Crosby Pro-Am. When I reached his longtime
publicist, Larry O'Brien, he said: “Come on, this is golf.
It happens to the best of `em.”
Not anymore. On Saturday at the NEC, Woods started birdie-eagle-birdie,
then “blew up” to a bogey and 14 straight pars. You
would have thought he had shot 82. His 67 was the fourth-best
round of the day. He eventually turned a cream-of-the-crop field
into so much spilled milk—the Nobody Else Counts. He turned
storied Firestone into a spare tire. His 11-shot victory again
turned the world's hardest game into theater of the absurd.
This cannot be happening.
The easily amused are awed by Woods' intergalactic tee shots.
Those who know golf are more amazed by how he has harnessed his
distance, temper and once-balky putter. Tiger Woods now has the
tightest, truest putting stroke in golf—the more pressure
the better.
Yet the most incredible development is that this former high school
nerd, nicknamed Urkel his freshman year at Stanford, has transformed
a game of skill into an athletic endeavor. Nicklaus could dominate
as Fat Jack. Woods runs and lifts weights to increase his stamina
and power.
For now Woods' only credible rivals are history and the haunting
game of golf. Sergio Garcia showed again Monday night—as
he did last year at Medinah's PGA—he has the flamboyant game
to occasionally challenge Woods. Garcia is one of the few who
aren't intimidated. Beating Woods 1 up could be a springboard.
But Garcia needs to get mentally and physically stronger.
After all, he caught Woods after Woods had conducted a Monday
morning clinic in Akron and had flown to Palm Springs fighting
a fever. This was just an exhibition. If this had been Sunday
at a major, there would have been just one player on Planet Tiger.
(c) 2000, Chicago Tribune.
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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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