Thursday, July 20, 2000
Woods will get Slam, if not this weekend,
then soon
By Bill Lyon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
Their names are Nicklaus and Hogan, Player and Sarazen. They are
The Four Horsemen of Golf.
Of all the tens of thousands of players who have made a living
over the years by flogging a dimpled ball over lush and treacherous
landscape, they are the only ones who have been able, in a career,
to win the four major tournaments that have come to be known as
the Grand Slam.
Notice the marquee names that are missing: Snead. Palmer. Watson.
Trevino. Nelson.
Each is lacking one of the biggies, either a U.S. Open or a Masters,
or a British Open or a PGA.
Comes now The Fifth Horseman.
It is not a matter of whether Tiger Woods will become a Slammist,
only when. Right now seems likely, and right now also seems fitting.
Young master Woods needs only the British Open to complete his
career Slam, and not only does that tournament begin today but
it is being contested on the holy of holies — St. Andrews,
cradle of the game.
They don't still play baseball on the very field where that game
was invented. Or football. Or basketball. But they do still play
golf where that most maddening of our games was stumbled upon,
nearly as thousand years ago by a bored shepherd smacking a rock
with his staff and pining for a tankard of ale at the 19th hole.
St. Andrews has a spiritual pull, and golf is the last sport in
which the players retain an actual working knowledge of the history
and the heritage of the game that rewards them, so there would
be a certain symmetry for Woods to win there, and now. It is obvious,
after all, that he is playing for history, just as Jack Nicklaus
did.
Nicklaus not only owns the Slam, he owns a “triple Slam —
six Masters, five PGAs, four U.S. Opens, three British Opens.
The irony is, Nicklaus didn't even realize what he had done, exactly,
when he won his first Slam.
“Nobody talked about the Grand Slam then. Statistics weren't
a big deal,” he said.
“When I won the British Open the first time, in 1966 at Muirfield,
someone mentioned then that now I'd won all four majors, but it
wasn't until three or four years later that I found out that only
four of us had ever done that.”
Well, the days of sneaking up on the Slam are long gone. A flotilla
of media washes along in Woods' wake. Only Palmer and Nicklaus
ever created such a stir and such a following, and like them he
handles it with aplomb. Like them, he is able to create for himself
a cocoon of concentration in the midst of chaos.
As for The Four Horsemen, to put them into some sort of perspective,
had they played baseball they would have been Ruth and Mays, Cobb
and Hornsby.
Or if the ball they used had been dribbled, they would have been
Jordan and Wilt, Russell and Magic.
What strikes you about the Four Horsemen is that they all seemed
much larger than they actually were. Sarazen was very short. The
Scots referred to Hogan as the Wee Ice Mon and in America's sports
pages he was always Bantam Ben. Player is not a lot bigger than
a jockey. Even Nicklaus doesn't reach six feet, though in his
prime you swore he was at least 8-foot-6.
Woods is well above 6-feet and still filling out.
Sarazen was the first Slammist. He had a punch swing but he was
a technical virtuoso and a feisty little bulldog of a competitor.
He was remembered as an aggressive player, one of those people
who make things happen, and who seem to have things happen to
them.
He struck what remains even now the single most famous shot in
golf, the double-eagle 4-wood at the 15th hole in the final round
of the 1935 Masters. “You'd think it was the only thing I'd
ever done,” he groused from time to time.
In fact, he came to be quite proud of that. In old age, he was
The Squire, dapper in plus-fours and ascot, and he would sit on
the veranda at Augusta National each spring, serenely submitting
to a series of interviews, eyes asparkle, flattered by the attention.
Hogan was next. He won nine Slam tournaments and he won them all
within a span of just seven years, and of the Four Horsemen he
came closest to winning them all in one year — three in 1953.
His contemporaries insist, and usually without argument, that
never has there been a golfer who practiced longer, harder or
with more delight than Hogan. He was a dour perfectionist, a loner,
happiest when he was by himself on the range making minute adjustments.
He was fiercely single-minded and determined to master the repeating
swing. He probably came closer to achieving that daunting goal
than anyone.
Player just shot his age (65) in a Seniors Tour tournament this
summer. He won his nine Slam titles over three different decades,
and he has won tournaments in five different decades and it will
be a surprise only if he does not win in a sixth one as well.
He is wiry and fit still, chirping merrily away about almost any
topic, but usually the sad and sorry state of the shabby and saggy
physical condition of most of the planet. He can be as off-putting
as a reformed smoker. But every time you encounter him you are
struck by his passion for all things, and his lust for golf.
No athlete has traveled as many miles to compete, nor is anyone
apt to. Why he continues to push himself so probably accounts
for his remarkable longevity.
As for Nicklaus, he remains on the shortest list of all.
There is Jack, and there is everyone else.
Tiger is stalking him.
Well, stalking his record rather than the man himself, who is
now 60 and is taking a valedictory tour of the majors.
But Nicklaus remembers when he was the hunted, by Palmer and Player,
then Tom Watson and Tom Weiskopf, by Johnny Miller and Lee Trevino.
“There was always someone coming along to challenge, and
I enjoyed that,” Nicklaus said. “Tiger hasn't had any
of that yet. But he will.”
Maybe.
You hope that there will be a Frazier to his Ali, a Sosa to his
McGwire, to push him, drive him.
You see elements of each of The Four Horsemen in Tiger Woods —
that dancing-eyed bulldoggedness of the swaggering little Sarazen,
that relentless pursuit of the perfect swing that prodded Hogan,
Player's commitment to fitness and jet lag, and the unblinking
will of Nicklaus.
St. Andrews looks as though it were made for Tiger Woods. But
the weather, surly in the best of circumstances, is capricious
and nasty. And there is the little matter of the game of golf
itself, which has no peer in terms of difficulty.
If it weren't so hard a game, then there would be more than just
Four Horsemen.
(c) 2000, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Visit Philadelphia Online, the Inquirer's World Wide Web site,
at http://www.philly.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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