Course management and weather the keys to how
Woods will do at Open
By Bill Lyon / Knight-Ridder Newspapers
It has never been established precisely who invented golf,
or where and when, and, of course, only God knows why.
But the Scots are more willing than most to take responsibility.
And they seem the most likely suspects because Scots believe that
it is the unavoidable fate of man to suffer, and never more so
than when he goes out to enjoy himself.
Now is that golf, or what?
You have never really been properly humbled until you have
stood over your second shot on a wild swatch of tumbling linksland,
squinted into a sea breeze at the green far off, and had this
conversation with your caddie, one of those dour little gnomes
who have an abhorrence of pretense in any form:
You: "Can I get there with a 5 iron?"
Him: "Eventually."
Now to the cradle of golf comes Tiger Woods, yearning to be
the hand that rocks the cradle.
They are a hard sell, the Scots. But you sense that they are
eager to hand over their hearts to the Fifth Beatle.
They admire excellence and craftsmanship, and so all Woods
has to do to win them over is win their national golfing championship.
That would be the British Open, which begins Thursday at Royal
Troon, a gray and melancholy course in the sea-scoured west of
Scotland.
This is how capricious and difficult golf is, and this is how
difficult the British Open is: Woods could win it, and he could
just as easily miss the cut.
Troon is far more difficult than Augusta National, which Woods
left in flames when he won The Masters in April, and, if more
forgiving, certainly no less punishing than Congressional, site
of last month's U.S. Open, in which Woods got thoroughly schooled
and finished 19th.
It seems inevitable that in the next couple of decades Woods
will win a British Open or five, but whether this is the first
one depends on what at the moment is seen as the weakest part
of his game: course management.
British Open golf is a bouncier brand than Americans are accustomed
to, and on British Open courses the ball is played on the ground
almost as much as it is in the air. Proper trajectory is crucial.
Those high lob shots that Woods sends halfway to heaven, the
ones that come down as delicately as spider webbing, are of no
use in places like Troon, where the wind comes slashing in off
the Irish Sea and sends approaches of altitude scuttling off line
and into death spirals into the heather and the gorse, to those
bleak places that cause the Scottish caddy to shake his head and
mutter a one-word obituary: "Unrecoverable."
No, in a British Open you have to get down under the wind,
and that requires playing a lot of bump-and-run.
In the process, you leave yourself vulnerable to the vagaries
of terrain and luck.
Woods can play bump-and-run. That's not the question. The question
is whether he can play it skillfully enough to win the oldest
championship in golf, in the place that gave birth to the game,
on a course he had not seen until this past week.
Being long and inordinately high with your approach irons does
not automatically reduce your chances in a British Open. After
all, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson hit the ball unusually high,
and between them they have won eight British Opens.
We already know what Woods can do to pedestrian tournament
courses: Reduce them to kindling. We know what he can do to Augusta
National: burn it to the ground. We know what he can't do - yet
- at a U.S. Open course. Now we will find out if he can adjust
his game to the conditions and the circumstances, which, in every
sport, ultimately is what separates great from good, and genius
from great.
And we might find out if he can play in foul weather. The British
Open, especially when held in Scottish seaside settings, almost
always includes rain and chill and what the Scots fondly call
a "hooley." This is a howling gale just above the rank
of tempest and just short of actual whitecaps splashing onto the
greens.
His prodigious driving distance will be of some help, of course,
but Troon has only three par-5s and plays to a level of 71.
This is Woods' first British Open as a professional; he played
twice as an amateur, never finishing better than 22d. And yet
the bookmakers have established him as the 6-to-1 favorite, even
ahead of more seasoned players such as Ernie Els, who has won
two U.S. Opens, and Colin Montgomerie, the home-village hero born
very close to Troon, plus the usual assortment of Greg Normans
and Nick Prices.
So the books have made official what the rest of us have known
for months now: Woods is the sport.
And how will Tiger-mania play in Europe?
Well, the Troon bookmakers have accepted a wager of a different
sort involving Woods - whether he will become president of the
United States. They have picked the year 2020 as the outside and
have set the odds at 1,000-to-1.
There have been takers.
And back in March, the organizers of this Open, playing to
Woods' appeal to a previously untapped audience, decided to offer
free admission to those younger than 18. Already his galleries
dwarf Arnie's Army, and on Sunday when the gallery ropes come
down after the approach shots have been struck on the 18th, if
Woods is in the last twosome, the whole island may be submerged
by the stampede.
If he wins, golf prospers.
If he loses, golf prospers.
If he wins, the following will only swell.
If he loses, golfers will feel momentarily reassured - "see,
our game really isn't that easy."
If he wins, it will be simply further validation.
If he loses, it will merely be part of his continuing education.
So Tiger at Troon becomes that rarest and most welcome of sporting
events. No downside.
(Bill Lyon is a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Write to him at: The Philadelphia Inquirer, 400 North Broad Street,
Philadelphia, Pa. 19130.)
(c) 1997, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Visit Philadelphia Online, the Inquirer's World Wide Web site,
at http://www.phillynews.com/
Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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