Sunday, July 23, 2000
The game inside the game
By JIM LITKE
AP Sports Writer
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland (AP) — The game
within the game is what always inspired Tiger Woods.
It drove him when the competition couldn't
and prize money wouldn't, past one benchmark after another and
now into history.
“He was always taught to play the golf
course,” Earl Woods said Sunday from his home in California,
watching his only child on TV hoisting the claret jug half a world
away.
“I told him, 'Just beat the golf course.
Everything else will take care of itself.'”
That worked when Tiger was 4 1/2 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'
bag is loaded with the latest technology, he 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.
“I was in a bunker every day I've been
here,” Woods said with a laugh afterward, “but it was
on the practice green.”
Woods made just three bogeys in four rounds.
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 within 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.
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