A few years back, I first wrote how Tiger Woods had done something that no other golfer — not Nicklaus or Hogan or Jones or Watson — had ever done. He had made golf look easy. And by easy, I don't mean effortless — though, of course, Tiger can make golf look effortless. I mean something else: He has taken out golf's elements of chance. He has removed the degree of difficulty. He has turned this big, sprawling, perplexing and ever-evolving game into something simple, something definitive. Something that makes sense.
Golf was never supposed to make sense. It was always supposed to be this wild ride in the wind. It was always supposed to be about holding up under pressure and taking your medicine and enjoying the lucky bounces and playing the ball where it lies. "There was only one time in my life when I went into a tournament knowing I was going to win and then won it," Tom Watson once told me. When I asked him what tournament, he refused to say. It's his happy secret. It's the one time he beat this mysterious game.
But, Tiger seemed to feel that way all that time. He boiled the game down to stark and powerful basics. If you make all your 12-foot par putts, you will make no bogeys. If you have practiced a shot for every occasion, then you will never have an occasion without a shot. If you turn double bogeys into bogeys and bogeys into pars, if you chip in more than most and often hit the ball close from the middle of the fairway, if you win all the tournaments you lead on Sunday and you play well enough to lead on Sunday all the time, well, there's just not much mystery left in the game. Tiger had been trained from a young age and later trained himself to play golf this way, without sentimentality, without reserve and without miscalculations. Nobody else in the world could play golf like that. Sometimes Tiger would just not play well. But mostly he did, and when he did, there were really only two possibilities. Tiger would either beat you, or you would beat yourself. Either way ... same thing.
And so, on the 17th green Sunday at the PGA Championship, it seemed entirely certain that one of those two things would happen to a 37-year-old golfer from Korea named Y.E. Yang. Tiger would beat him, or Yang would beat himself. The two choices. The only surprising thing was that it had taken this long to get to the choices. Yang had spent a wonderful afternoon in Minnesota smiling and waving to the crowd and making good shots and riding the top of the leaderboard. At the 17th, he led Tiger Woods by a stroke. The announcers on television had spent much of the afternoon marveling at Yang's calm — commenting at great length about his composure ("He seems cool as a cucumber!"), his vital signs ("He's breathing well!"), his mental state ("Positive body language!") and his sense of well being ("Look at him smiling!"). It was fun. It could not last.
Yang's good play — especially while other more famous golfers like Padraig Harrington, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh self destructed — was surprising, but probably less surprising than the tentative way Tiger Woods played. That was a thunderbolt. He laid up on a Par 5. He left putts short. He seemed utterly unlike the predator that we had come to know — all afternoon long he backed off shots and tossed blades of grass into the wind. All afternoon long, everyone just waited for Tiger to take over, to hit some kind of definitive shot, to turn Y.E. Yang into another in a long line of noble but defeated opponents. But Tiger wavered. He waffled. Which way is the wind blowing? He hit great shots, of course, because he's Tiger Woods. But, he lacked conviction.
And it was Yang, at the 14th hole, who hit the definitive shot. He chipped in for eagle with Woods' ball just 12 feet away from birdie. That remarkable chip gave Yang a two-shot lead. The announcers exclaimed that Woods was "shocked," and maybe he was but you could not see it on his face. He stepped up to his own ball and knocked in his own birdie putt to immediately cut the margin to 1 shot. Woods then walked toward the 15th hole with a determined stride, as if he was just about ready to put away all the foolishness. "They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain/And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again."
One thing about Tiger ... he's always had this remarkable sense of time. I don't mean TIMING, though of course Woods has always had great timing too — he tends to know when a great shot will be a dagger, when a sunk putt will drain his opponent of hope. This is part of what makes him such a great match-play golfer.
But here I mean a sense of time. Woods seems to know that eventually his moment and his chance will present itself. I often think about this game I saw Larry Bird play once in the late '80s or early 90s — a meaningless NBA regular season game in Charlotte. Bird wasn't himself by then; his back was hurting and he was more legend than star. But he was still awfully good, and what struck me that day was that while everyone else on the floor was playing the game live, Bird was playing it on rewind. He played as if he had already seen the game before and knew how it turned out. There was utterly no tension in his game, no anxiety, no break in his rhythm. When he missed a shot, he acted as if that was just PART OF THE PLAN — like the Celtics needed that missed shot to win. Same with every turnover, every foul, every brilliant pass, every timeout. It wasn't as if Bird was controlling the game — he wasn't quite good enough to control at that stage of his career. No, it was like he was an actor in a movie and he had already read the script.
Good day brings Harrington closer to WoodsKimura lifts Rapids past visiting FCD
