TIGER FALLS BACK DOWN TO EARTH
Woods’ wild card was billed as the Return of the King . . . it became just one more Ryder Cup failure
TIGER WOODS stood on the 15th green at Le Golf National. He was surrounded by water and beset by images of rivals celebrating. It was late morning and the giant screen at the top of the steep bank where the spectators sat in their thousands was showing Sergio Garcia punching the air wildly after adding another point to Europe’s total.
The world’s greatest golfer has only been on the winning side once in his previous seven appearances at a Ryder Cup and he must already have begun to sense that he wasn’t about to make it twice any time soon. It has been his fate to become a symbol of American underachievement in the competition and this weekend in France has conformed entirely to type.
An even bigger entourage of camera crews, reporters, team support staff and wives and girlfriends than usual was following Woods and his fourballs partner, Patrick Reed. That was less out of hope of seeing Woods win his first Ryder Cup point with a partner for eight years and more because they had bled across from other matches where America had already lost.
There was still an atmosphere of euphoria in the crowd who had seen Tyrrell Hatton and Paul Casey add to what was starting to look like an insurmountable European lead by closing out their match against Dustin Johnson and Rickie Fowler on the 16th a few minutes earlier.
Woods knew he needed to sink his six-foot putt to give him and Reed even a faint chance of salvaging something from their match against Europe’s ‘Moliwood’ dream team of Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood, who had already beaten him in one match at this Ryder Cup and would go on to crush him in another.
Woods bent over his putt, stroked the ball across that island green towards the hole and watched it slide to the right. The roars of the European fans echoed round the nat ural a mphitheatre. Woods looked down at the turf in disgust and stayed there for a few seconds, holding the pose. Then he scooped the ball up with his putter, flicked it up into the air, held out his hand to try to catch it — and dropped it.
Woods had arrived here on the southern outskirts of Paris accompanied by a narrative of rebirth after he won the Tour Championship in Atlanta last weekend but even though he did not play badly, his demeanour and his defeats in the first two days of this Ryder Cup made him appear forlorn and vulnerable again. Played 3, Lost 3 are hardly the statistics to go with a gala performance of The Return of the King.
The delight that had greeted his return to health and to winning and the mania that accompanied his victory in Atlanta were more evidence that despite all his struggles and his absences, he remains the
biggest star and the biggest draw in the sport.
He had joked earlier in the week that some of the Europe team had said they wanted to play against him and that they ought to be careful what they wished for but the idea of taking him down appeared to drive Fleetwood and Molinari to even greater heights.
He lost three times with two different partners — Reed and nd Bryson DeChambeau au — and each time, he was well beaten. In n his defence, neither Reed nor DeChambeau played well. Teammates often seem to shrink i n his presence as if they are overawed by his s legend.
It was also Woods’s ’s ill fortune that each time he played, he was up against Fleetwood and Molinari, who have redefined the notion of what a Ryder Cup hot streak means. The scale of Woods’s defeats yesterday, though — 4&3 in the morning fourballs and 5&4 in the afternoon foursomes — told the story of a man who has fallen to earth again.
It could be said that Woods struggling to perform at a Ryder Cup is another sign of the return of the old Tiger. He has always seemed ill-atease in a team situation and he has now lost seven matches in succession, a run that stretches back to Celtic Manor in 2010.
His singles record is good but overall he has lost los 20 of the 36 matches he has contested, only one shy of the record held he by Phil Mickelson, who w is still working on adding a to his total. Woods’s lacklustre showing here has helped set the tone for f what has turned into in something close to a capitulation by a USA team who were widely widel expected to sweep Europe aside a in France. Perhaps his struggles here are not surprising after what it must have taken out of him, emotionally and physically, to win the Tour Championship after the adversity he has endured in recent years. But Woods has seemed drained of energy at Le Golf National. He has sucked the life out of his partners, too. Patrick Reed, an effervescent Captain America at Hazeltine two years ago, looked timid.
Woods appeared grim most of the time here. Losing can do that to you but his body language has been awkward since the beginning of his first match on Friday. American commentators noted yesterday that, with temperatures in the 70s, Woods was still wearing his ‘rain pants’ during his and DeChambeau’s afternoon drubbing by Fleetwood and Molinari.
Afterwards, he insisted that he was not suffering any physical problems but it did not look that way. He looked like a man who has had spinal fusion surgery. He looked, once more, like a man who was trying to overcome his body as well as his opponent.
‘I feel pretty good, actually,’ he insisted at the end of the day’s play. ‘ Just ****** off that I lost my matches.’ A small consolation is that he won’t have to play either Molinari or Fleetwood in the singles today. Jon Rahm will be his opponent. A Woods win might at least reassure us that his rebirth has not been cancelled. Just interrupted.