August 30, 1999
Woods is all about winning
By Terry Pluto
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
AKRON, Ohio — The winning.
That's what really matters the most to Tiger Woods.
Not the money, the commercials, the limos or the glitz. Sure,
he'll take it. He'll complain about the fame, the hassles, the
headlines.
But he gets it. He knows who he is. He's Tiger Woods. Women see
him and swoon. Men stand, open-mouthed, awestruck. Little children
kids want to cling to his pant legs.
That's part of it.
But it's not what Woods is about. It's not what drives this 23-year-old
who has become the best golfer in the world. If it were, he never
would have won Sunday's NEC Invitational.
Woods is about winning.
He can walk away with a million bucks--as he did Sunday--and just
sort of shrug off the money part. Because, just three years after
turning pro, he's already made so much, he can say that it's not
about the money--and actually be telling the truth.
“It's about going against the best players and beating them,”
he said.
And doing it week after week after week.
Tiger Woods is only 23, and he has won five of his last eight
tournaments. Tiger Woods is only 23, yet he's mature and gutsy
enough to have revamped his game, to have risked taking a step
back to make a giant leap forward.
Tiger Woods at 23 has a chance to be the greatest golfer--ever.
At 23, Tiger Woods is already one of the supreme closers in golf
history.
He went into Sunday's final round leading--and won the tournament.
Just as he's done in each of the last nine tournaments in which
he's led on the last day.
Think about that.
Nine times Tiger Woods leads, nine times he wins. No choking.
No bad breaks. Nothing.
He leads, he wins.
No looking over his shoulder. No standing too long over a clutch
putt. No thinking about what can go wrong or obsessing about the
other players' scores on the board.
Just make the shot.
So it was Sunday on the 17th green. He stood over a 15-foot putt.
In the last few holes, he hadn't been putting. It was more like
closing his eyes, kicking the ball and praying it found the hole.
But this time, he stared steely-eyed and had steady hands before
taking that 15-footer.
He blows it, suddenly he goes from feeling Phil Mickelson's breath
on the back of his neck to feeling Mickelson's fist around his
throat.
He made the putt.
Not dead solid perfect, but he made it.
And he pumped his fist over and over and over. Not because of
the million bucks in prize money. No, it was because he had driven
a stake right into the heart of Mickelson's comeback.
It was the sheer joy of knowing he needed one more good putt--on
a day when it would have been easier for him to hit a Randy Johnson
fastball with a toothbrush than hole that 15-foot putt.
But he made the putt.
He made it because he's Tiger Woods, and because this was the
last day of a tournament, and it was a putt that was the difference
between winning and losing.
When Tiger Woods was a kid, he had a list of Jack Nicklaus' major
tournament victories tacked up over his bed, something to stare
at before he closed his eyes.
Talk about making dreams come true. Woods now has two victories
in majors, the same as Nicklaus did at the age of 23.
But that's only part of it.
The casual golf fans know about the Tigermania, how in 1997 he
won the Masters by a dozen strokes.
“That makes people think you can win a lot and win in bunches,”
he said.
Woods won four times in 1997, but only once last year, a year
when he had everyone asking him, “What's wrong?”
He tried to explain about changing his game, about not wanting
to hit the ball for miles, just be more accurate. He talked golf
techno-talk about altering his swing, sacrificing a little now
for the big payoff later.
And people said--right.
Hey, Tiger, the real problem is too much, too soon. Too many dates
with supermodels, not enough time on the driving range and putting
greens.
Now, they know better.
Woods transformed himself from a naturally gifted athlete who
happened to play golf to a pure golfer.
“I reduced my power, I don't hit the ball anywhere as far
as I did last year,” he said.
Now, he just hits it better.
It's just like what his new buddy, Michael Jordan, did on the
court. Jordan gave up some of the skywalking in exchange for the
medium-range jump shots.
Boring, but effective.
Dunks don't consistently win games. Neither do golfers who play
wildly from one end of the course to the other, as Woods once
did.
With five victories this year, Woods is emerging as a young man
who lives in the unrelenting bright lights of fame, yet doesn't
blink when the pressure is on.
“Winning never gets old,” he said Sunday. “That's
the oldest cliche, but it's true.”
Especially for the great ones.
(c) 1999, Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio).
Visit Akron Beacon Journal Online at http://www.ohio.com/.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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