Tuesday, August 31, 1999
Woods elevates his game into rare air
By Bill Lyon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
He is less The Golden Child now, less the prodigy with extravagant
but unrefined talent, less the assassin of little dimpled balls.
Before our very eyes, Eldrick Woods is maturing into a polished
and resourceful golfer, a performer for the ages. He is evolving
into exactly what we had been expecting, which is just about the
hardest thing there is to do in sports. Now he is beginning to
make good on all those lavishly outrageous predictions that we
put on him like cement shoes.
He won another tournament Sunday, over another punishingly
long and well-regarded course, and he did it much like he had
won the PGA a couple of weeks earlier, by squandering most of
a lead and then bulldogging his way home.
Against a field that included the top 10 players in the world
and just about everyone who will compete in the Ryder Cup in three
weeks, Tiger Woods was much the better player. Only Phil Mickelson
could make a serious run at him. Woods sealed it with a 16-foot
birdie putt on the 17th hole, one of those strokes that plumbs
the depth of a man's soul.
He is having a Jordan-Gretzky-McGwire-Sosa summer. He has won
five American tournaments this season (and one in Germany) and
it's usually news when anyone manages three. It has been 19 years
since anyone (Tom Watson, in his prime) won six tournaments on
the U.S. Tour. After that the air becomes very rare - Jack Nicklaus
won seven in a year, and Johnny Miller eight.
Woods was 23 years, 8 months and 30 days old on Sunday, the
same age almost to the hour as Nicklaus was in 1963 when he set
the record for youngest player to win five times in a year. And
it is, of course, Nicklaus whom Woods is pursing.
He has a dauntingly long way to go. The measurement is majors,
and Woods will need to average one a year for the next 17 years
to overtake Nicklaus. The fields are much deeper, the competition
considerably more difficult than during Nicklaus' domination,
and there was a time there when Woods looked like he was being
overwhelmed by Tigermania. He certainly wouldn't have been the
first to be swamped by celebrityhood.
But he seems to have righted himself. He shows evidence of
becoming his own man, off and on the course. He has a new agent,
one less abrasive. His father, who often ignited controversy even
from the back of the room, has melded into the scenery. The caddy
who became a celebrity himself was let go. The load was lightened,
the focus narrowed, the distractions regretfully but relentlessly
removed.
As the Jordans and Gretzys and McGwires will tell you, playing
the game is the easiest part of the day.
On the course, Tiger has done something even more difficult.
He had the courage to listen to his swing adviser and make some
subtle but significant changes in his swing and in his game. That
is an act that requires both an astonishing sublimation of ego
and a willingness to look 20 years ahead and not just 20 days.
For the last two years he has been working on the mechanics
of his game. He said he watched a videotape of his precedent-shattering
Masters runaway in 1997 and realized that neither his swing nor
his game was reliable, something that would hold up over the years.
That is a remarkable epiphany.
Here he had won one of the most glamorous events in all of
sports, by a Secretariat-like margin, and was barely 21 besides.
The understandable reaction might have been to chug a case and
continue to swagger along just busting the tar out of the ball.
Instead, he had the emotional equilibrium to conclude that his
swing needed to be pared down and brought under control. Along
with himself.
He didn't exactly disappear during those two seasons of adjusting
and tweaking, but he wasn't playing like Nicklaus, either. But
now the swing is to his liking, dependable and repeatable. He
has had experience and has profited from it. And now the results
mount up, impressively.
Nick Price, the only other player in this decade to win five
times in a year, had the best summation of Tiger Woods: “I
played with him at the U.S. Open in '95 and there was a lot of
raw talent there. Over the last two or three years I've played
with him on numerous occasions. Every time I've played with him
it seems like he's rounding off an edge here or there. He's going
about it very astutely. I think he's going to continue to improve.”
He has reduced the wild shots that embroiled him in trouble,
though those strays continue to plague him at times. He has become
a more complete player, and he has improved his game around the
green, an area that was a bugaboo for Nicklaus.
In the last nine tournaments that he has led or co-led after
three rounds, Woods has won every one of them. To do so, frequently
he has had to make a hugely important putt. He always has, sometimes
seeming to will the ball into the hole. Now we're talking Nicklaus
and Palmer.
Some perspective on where Woods stands exactly: He has won
12 tournaments even though he is not yet 24, and you should know
that separates him from an awful lot of players. Only 15 players
have ever won 30 or more tournaments in a career. He could have
30 before he's 30.
Surely he has locked up Player of the Year for 1999. He is
the first to go past $4 million in earnings in one season, though
that is an irrelevant figure. That is, if $4 million can be irrelevant.
But as recently as a generation ago, $100,000 in a year in purses
would get you among the money leaders.
Price said he expects Tiger Woods to have won all four majors
within the next couple of years. And then the enemy becomes complacency.
“By the time he gets to 25 or 26, he'll have conquered
most of the mountains,” Price said. “He'll have all
the money in the world. The big thing he mustn't lose is the desire
to go out and win. It's just a question of can he keep it going
like Nicklaus did. The way he looks right now, he probably will.”
That was what distinguished Nicklaus, that unrelenting ambition.
Remember, too, that Nicklaus reinvented himself, shedding weight
and adding hair. And he was never too proud to seek out his swing
guru and seek to improve.
Greatness becomes that way by never becoming satisfied.
(c) 1999, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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