Tuesday, August 31, 1999
Woods is all about winning
By Terry Pluto
Knight Ridder Newspapers
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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