Golf still needs Tiger
Tiger Woods may not have won the PGA Championship, but he sure made it worth watching.
The PGA Championship didn’t need Tiger Woods to win Sunday in St. Louis, and he didn’t. The PGA didn’t really need Tiger to even contend, even though he did.
The PGA had most of its usual suspects center stage. Even without Tiger, the Bellerive Country Club would have bristled with drama.
Brooks Koepka won the tournament, and he’s now won three of the last seven major titles. Justin Thomas, who won the PGA a year ago, was hot on the trail. Rickie Fowler, Jason Day, Francesco Molinari. All kinds of big names were around the leaderboard. Others, like Jordan Speith, Dustin Johnson
and Tommy Fleetwood, weren’t too far back. Such stars have turned golf into a game of young lions. So the PGA would have been quite the spectacle, even without Tiger.
But the game of golf absolutely needed and needs Tiger. The lion in winter does for golf what the young lions never could do.
Maybe you cheer for Tiger. Maybe you cheer against Tiger. Maybe you cheer for Tiger because Jim Traber cheers against him.
Doesn’t matter. Tiger makes you care, one way or another. He never grabbed the lead, like he did in the final round of the British Open at Carnoustie three weeks ago, but he got close, and it made for a rousing afternoon. Tiger shot 64 Sunday and finished second, two strokes behind Koepka.
Koepka is a stunning
talent — four career professional victories, three of them majors. He also joked earlier in the week about being unrecognized at dinner the other night, while pal Dustin Johnson got lots of attention.
Beating Tiger on such a stage is going to accelerate Koepka's fame in ways that beating Brian Harmon (2017 U.S. Open) or Fleetwood (2018 U.S. Open) never could. Such is the nature of Tigermania.
The 42-year-old Tiger woke up the echoes in steamy St. Louis. Maybe not like Jack Nicklaus did in winning the Masters at age 46 in 1986. Maybe not like 59-year-old Tom Watson dang near did at Turnberry in 2009.
But on a hot August day, America was reminded of yesteryear, when Tiger was a cultural phenomenon that transcended sport. When he was Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley, American originals who took their vocation where it never had been.
Golf was never the same, in a good way, after Tiger’s ascension. After 14 major titles in 12 years,
after taking square aim at Nicklaus’ Everest total of 18. After the masses, not just the elite, swarmed to the sport, igniting a commerce that made golfers richer than their wildest dreams.
Then came Tiger’s selfafflicted fall, and now an arduous comeback that, frankly, might never reach another pinnacle.
I don’t know if Tiger will win another major. He’s certainly capable. He just shot 14-under in the PGA. Sprayed his driver all over Bellerive, didn’t hit a fairway on the front nine Sunday, and still shot 64.
So Tiger can do it. Doesn’t mean he will. Koepka shot 16-under. That’s a tall order for a vintage Tiger, much less a 42-year-old Tiger who’s been cut up by surgeons’ knives and internal demons.
Majors are hard to win. Harder than ever, if you don’t count those stretches last decade when Tiger hoarded majors like the Warriors hoard all-stars.
But golf is the rare sport in which time takes its time. Golf has its moments when the greats of the game can recapture the magic of better days.
Willie Mays and Michael Jordan and Peyton Manning got old right before our eyes and were shells of their former greatness. We’ve seen Tiger Woods with the same fate. But we knew Mays and Jordan and Manning would not reverse the ravages, not even for a sliver of time. We don’t know that with Tiger.
He showed at Carnoustie, and even moreso at Bellerive, that he’s still got game, that he can wake up the echoes and he can make us care about golf in ways that we never did before his ascension and haven’t since his descent.