Tiger’s Ryder quest
> Reinvented and resurgent, Woods can rewrite his own Cup history
THERE’S A story about Tiger Woods from before the 2002 Ryder Cup at The Belfry that offers just the merest insight into the particular, peculiar way his mind works.
Ahead of the competition, Sky Sports were trying to spice up their usual humdrum pretournament interviews with a few quirkier, offbeat questions, to be asked to each of the players in turn.
One of the questions is what they would do if they came across a spider in the bath.
Most of the players answer without fuss, in the breezy, offhand spirit in which the question was intended.
Woods, on the other hand, ponders the question for a few moments, before asking: “Where in the bath is it?
That’s Tiger, you see. Clinical. Analytical. Just a little bit… strange. A man who sees the world in terms of puzzles and solutions.
It’s the same quality that made him so devastating on a golf course, and so enigmatically flawed off it. It’s hard not to admire Tiger Woods. But god, you wouldn’t want to be him.
And so, as he arrived in Europe on the back of an outpouring of collective emotion the likes of which golf has not seen since the dog days of Jack Nicklaus, Woods now addresses his next puzzle: how to re-raise yourself for a Ryder Cup after the stunning high of winning your first title in five years.
It has, by his own admission, been a wild few days: from the evangelical masses of Atlanta on Sunday night to the Parisian suburbs on Tuesday afternoon, still trying to process the seismic shockwave he has created, both in the sport, and himself.
A couple of minutes after Woods left the press conference room at Le Golf National, Bryson DeChambeau walked in, momentarily flummoxed by the sea of faces before him.
“Was Tiger in here?” he joked, as he took his seat. “I’m higher in the world rankings than him, as well.”
For Woods himself, this week presents a very particular challenge. For one thing, there’s replying to all the congratulatory text messages he has received since his victory in the Tour Championship on Sunday night.
But once he has got rid of the little red dot on his phone, he has the job of improving an American team in which, for much of the last two decades, he has been as much a hindrance as a help.
Is it purely a statistical quirk, after all, that America’s two victories this century – at Valhalla in 2008 and Hazeltine in 2016 – have both come with Woods on the sidelines?
A decade ago, he was undergoing reconstructive knee surgery. Two years ago, in the midst of the worst slump of his career, he was a noncombatant vice-captain. That’s six defeats out of six since he lifted the trophy at Brookline in 1999.
And for much of the past two decades, Woods in many ways encapsulated the divide between the successful Europe and the ailing America: reserved rather than gregarious, individualistic rather than collegiate.
Woods offered a story of his own, from his first Ryder Cup at Valderrama in 1997.
Playing in the morning foursomes, his playing partner and friend Mark O’Meara suggested that the layout of the course made Woods a better fit to tee off on the oddnumbered holes.
“No, I like evens,” Woods replied, secretly dreading hitting the first tee shot. Eventually O’Meara pulled rank and ordered him to tee off first.
But the episode encapsulated not just Woods’s own neuroses – and even at the height of his success, he was a far more insecure character than many realised – but the introspective instinct for self-preservation that held him back in this competition for so long.
That, by all accounts, has changed. Perhaps the most poignant part of Woods’s win at East Lake on Sunday was when he stepped off the 18th green to be greeted with the genuine warmth and elation of his fellow players: DeChambeau, Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler were all there to celebrate with him.
These days, Woods is far more approachable – a far more likeable – figure on tour.
Since his vice-captaincy stint in 2016, and his rapprochement with Phil Mickelson a couple of years earlier, Woods has reinvented himself as a team man.
The time when US captains would hem and fret over how they were going to manage Woods during Ryder Cup week has passed.
Now all the worrying is done by the opposition. - The Independent