Wednesday, June 14, 2000
Time for Woods to start stacking
up more hardware
By Bill Lyon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — It is time now.
It is time for Eldrick Woods to begin pulling the sword from the
stone.
He nods. He knows what you mean. He agrees.
Those winning streaks, all that money, the
intimidating of the rest of the field ... that's all well and
good. But what he needs to start playing for now is history, and
his place in it.
“The Hunt. That's how Jack Nicklaus
always referred to it. The hunt for the really big trophies. The
majors. The tournaments that separate and distinguish. The moments
that elevated Nicklaus over every other golfer ever.
It is time for Tiger Woods to start stacking
those up.
Now, and here, would be a good place to
start. The “now is the U.S. Open, which begins tomorrow,
and the “here is Pebble Beach, a course with a wild, tangled
beauty that both enthralls Tiger Woods and moves him to inspired
shot-making.
Silly, isn't it? Silly to suggest that Tiger
Woods needs to start winning, when that's about all that he has
been doing. But there is winning and there is “The Hunt.
He is in his fourth season as a professional
and has won two majors. At the end of his fourth season as a pro,
Nicklaus had won four majors.
“We're pretty close,” Woods said,
and he knows exactly how close because from the time he was The
Prodigy he kept on his bedroom wall a poster of Nicklaus and his
majors. So, yes, he knows. Oh yes, he knows.
And when it was suggested Tuesday that Nicklaus'
record, those 18 major professional championships, might not be
reachable any longer, given the depth of talent in today's fields,
he jumped on that as he would one of those 350-yard boomers down
the middle.
“Oh it's viable, definitely,”
he said. “What you have to do is what Jack did, which is
put yourself in position to win. You're not going to win every
one, obviously. There are times you're going to beat everybody
down the stretch, times they're going to give you a major, and
other times a person is going to flat out-play you.
“But the key is to put yourself there,
time and time again, on the back nine on Sunday, and see what
happens.”
He has gotten the knack of that on the regular
tour. He is still learning how to do it when the air is rare.
You sense in him the same fierce and unbending
will, the knife-edge mental toughness that sustained Nicklaus
for so long and so well.
And he has come to understand that golf
is a game best played with a gentle touch.
You play a course as you would go courting.
You woo a course, rather than try to club it to death. You coax
and cajole, stroke and finagle.
In his tempestuous earlier days, when he
could hit a ball through three zip codes, he was enamored with
bullying a course, taking it to its knees. Only recently has Tiger
Woods come to see that most courses resist attempts to overpower
them.
“I've learned to take what the course
is willing to give me,” he said. “It's best not to fight
it. Go out there and play for what it has to offer that day.
“I think this is a natural progression
of learning. And I guess, like any teenager, we thought we knew
everything.”
He is only 24. But already he seems to have
acquired the sort of course management that reminds you of Nicklaus,
and also many of Nicklaus' mannerisms.
He spoke, for example, how he wishes for
difficult playing conditions. Let the sea winds blow all four
days. Let them blow the lesser players into whimpering submission.
“If you're playing well, you always
want to have the conditions tough,” he said. “The harder
the conditions, the more it favors the person who's playing well.”
Close your eyes and you could hear Nicklaus
in his prime, speaking with the same sort of self-assurance, with
the same sort of confidence, a confidence bordering on arrogance,
that implied:” Let's let the pretenders eliminate themselves
early.
You can approach the game that way only
if you are really, really good. And you know it.
You like Tiger Woods' chances of winning
his first U.S. Open. You like his chances a lot. He is, by his
own assessment, playing “pretty good.”
He smiled a little half-smile when he said
that, a little half-smile that stopped a couple of inches short
of being a smirk, a little half-smile that said: “Actually,
I'm stone killing the ball these days.
And you like his chances a lot because of
the old courses-for-horses theory. He plays Pebble especially
well. The grandeur and the mystique uplift his game. He is absolute
murder on the greens here, and his confidence is ragingly high.
In February, he made up 7 shots on the last day to win the AT&T
National Pro-Am.
“I first played it when I was 13 and
I remember it being s-o-o-o-o long,” he said, smiling again,
“and then I came back when I was 17 or 18 and I thought how
short the golf course had gotten. Maybe just the fact that I had
added about 30 yards and six inches.”
But he has shaped his game for this course.
It will be surprising if he doesn't win. The only other time you
could say such an outrageous thing was when Nicklaus was immersed
in “The Hunt. You presume that Tiger has consulted with Nicklaus
about the fine art of bagging the big trophies.
“The funny thing is, we've never even
talked about that,” Woods replied. “I've had several
lunches with him and I've talked to him a lot of times on the
course, but never about playing golf. I guess it's a little weird,
because you think I'd try to pick his brain.
“But I've always felt that if he wants
to offer something, he'll say something. I've never been one to
press on and dig something out of somebody.”
Probably just as well.
In the end, you have to pull the sword out
of the stone by yourself.
(c) 2000, The Philadelphia
Inquirer.
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