DUST BUSTER!
D.J. rocks Shinnecock as Tiger heads home early
IT’S bad enough for Tiger Woods that he’s the one-man equivalent of a bad baseball team right now. Mets fans understand: When the offense works, the bullpen is a tiref ire; when the starting pitching is sublime, the offense goes into witness protection.
That’s Tiger. At the start of the season, his short game was every bit as good as we remembered it back in the day, but you needed a GPS to keep track of his drives and long irons. Now he’s hitting it fine teeto-green, but you get the sense he would have a hard time tapping one into the Grand Canyon.
And, well, there’s the scorecard. Ball, as they say, don’t lie, and neither do the numbers next to your name on a leaderboard: in this case 2-over for the day, 10-over for the tournament and a U.S. Open that’s over for him before the weekend.
“I’m not very happy the way I played and the way I put ted ,” Woods said at the end of his abbreviated 36-hole stay at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. “I’m 10-over par. So I don’t know that you can be too happy and too excited about 10-over par.”
Yes. That would be bad enough, feeling like an imposter walking in your own Nikes, believing, however foolishly, the dominator that once inhabited your soul is still waiting to be roused from slumber. The worst part? For two days, Woods had to walk alongside Dustin Johnson, who in 2018 is every bit the behemoth that Tiger himself was 15 years ago, 20 years ago, who possesses every bit of the game and the swagger that Tiger understands better than any player who ever has lived. For two days, Tiger got to see what he used to be, got a taste of what it was like to walk alongside Peak Tiger.
If Johnson, with his one career major, doesn’t necessarily measure up to Tiger and his 14, the disparity between Johnson at the top of his game and the rest of the world is inching toward the way it used to look in the old days, when we didn’t wonder if Woods would pass Jack Nicklaus’ magic number of 18 majors, but instead guessed how high he would reset the record.
“You don’t win major championships by kind of slapping all around the place and missing putts,” Woods said. “You have to be on.”
One of them was on the past two days. It wasn’t Woods.
“I felt I played really well,” Johnson said.
What he did was play an entirely different golf course, an almost entirely different tournament, than almost everyone else in the field. Even with rain softening the greens, even with the wind calmer than Thursday, Shinnecock peppered the best golfers in the world with body blows all day. Tommy Fleetwood was one exception, but he had played so poorly Thursday that his 66 only nudged him to 1-over for the Open.
Johnson, for much of the day, was the only one with a red number next to his name after firing 69-67 at Shinnecock. That’s the kind of gap Woods used to see at these events, as if he were a one-man varsity crashing a JV tournament. Almost everyone else in the field looked as if they had been attending a wake as they made their grisly tour of the course; Johnson looked like he was having the time of his life, especially when he jarred a 50-foot putt for his final birdie of the day at No. 7, his 16th hole, and laughed his whole way to the cup to retrieve his ball.
Everyone else seemed like they were fixing to saw their clubs in two; Johnson joked when he was asked if he ever mistreated his equipment: “I don’t throw clubs. It’s not the club’s fault. I wish it was, but it’s not.”
His playing partner surely remembers what it was like to feel like you could lap the field at any given major. It is, in fact, that memory that allows him to believe — even as the evidence mounts against him — that he could capture that magic again. “Absolutely,” Woods said. Someone asked, “Why?” “Have you seen the way I’ve been swinging?”
Mostly, we see the way he has been scoring, and right now it looks like Johnson would be giving him five shots a side just to keep things interesting. Maybe it was like this when Eric Clapton was allegedly asked what it was like to be the best guitar player in the world, and he purportedly said, “I don’t know. Ask Prince.”
Clapton never really said that. And Woods would probably never say that about Johnson, even now. No matter how true either statement may be.