No country for an old Tiger? Not a bit of it
YOU guys ready to play some golf?’ asked the starter. And, yes he was. That’s exactly what Tiger Woods was ready for. Some golf.
He smiled, slapped his playing partner Rory McIlroy on the back. Damn right he was ready. Not to win maybe. Not yet. By the summer, though, who knows? We have seen enough of the old Tiger at Augusta this week not to give up on him yet.
The problem with new Tiger, though, is that as desperate as he appears to march on, obstacles line his path, like tree roots. In some cases, exactly like tree roots. At the ninth, playing out of the pines, Woods found a root at full pelt on his follow-through. He dropped his club like a red-hot poker, his face creased with pain.
It continued to bother him for several holes, a jarring up his right arm and into his shoulder. It was rotten luck. There is, however, a well-worn method of avoiding such misfortune. Hit it on the fairway. Woods did not find a single fairway until the 13th, when he was rewarded with an eagle. Until that point, he spent so much time in the trees he should have been fitted with a lumberjack shirt. At the 10th he was in so deep they were thinking of sending Lassie for help.
Still, it could have been worse. This was the Masters that Tiger was advised to miss. There were some sage voices out there, saying his old friend would turn on him, that he might be embarrassed by his favourite homeland course. His game was broken, he was broken, it was argued. This was no country for an old man with a faltering short game. Some folk wanted their happy memories preserved.
These four days, however, have revealed a healthier reality. Woods didn’t come back too soon, he just took his leave too late. Looking at the tournaments he played in January and February, it was plain he didn’t want to be there. He should have called time out then. Had he done so, had he started his recovery earlier, who knows where his game would have been by the time he reached Augusta.
As it was, were it not for the phenomenon of Jordan Spieth’s first 54 holes, he would have been in contention starting the final day. Woods, like McIlroy, began six under par but with Spieth 10 shots ahead, it was idealistic to even contemplate a charge. Woods would need a score approaching the course record, and Spieth a collapse — and he is not well-placed for miracles yet. Another major? Well, you wouldn’t bet against that one.
This was far from tournament winning golf — he was one over par on the front nine and inconsistent coming home — but overall this was certainly the best of several recent comebacks, one that inspired speculation about where Woods’s game will be come St Andrews in July. He loves the Old Course almost as much as he loves Augusta. It brings the best out of him — and Tiger’s best may still be good enough, one day.
He had been blown away here — they all had — by a 21-year-old Texan who spent the first three days rewriting the record books. By the time Woods and McIlroy stood on the tee at 2.30pm local time, Spieth had spoiled it for just about everyone. Only two men — Justin Rose and Phil Mickelson — were deemed capable of catching him. The world was finally going to see the two biggest names in golf paired in the final round of a major, only for it to be part of a distant undercard. Maybe that was why yesterday’s round fell flat, for Woods more than McIlroy.
Coming to Augusta, had Woods been offered the same score as the young Ulsterman going into Sunday, he would no doubt have taken it. Even equality with McIlroy and joint fifth in the field would have held appeal, too. Yet McIlroy, joint fifth and 10 shots off the lead? What a kick in the guts that was.
WOODS wasn’ t ready to have a precociously gifted 21-year-old tear up the course as he did in 1997. As if it wasn’t hard enough to stay competitive in the here and now, it was his 72-hole record that Spieth had under siege: needing to shoot 69 to break Woods’s record score at the Masters. In the difficult circumstances that preceded this tournament, Tiger most certainly brought his A game, circa 2015; how was he to know he also required a time machine to stay in the mix?
What is plain is that rumours of Tiger’s demise were exaggerated. He was diagnosed from afar as having the chipping yips, and there were plenty of amateur physicians declaring his condition at best chronic and at worst incurable. Phil Mickelson, however, offered a second opinion. Speaking at Torrey Pines, where Woods quit after 12 holes to rebuild his short game, he was a rare voice predicting this cautiously positive return.
‘I think Tiger’s going to have the last laugh,’ Mickelson said. ‘I think his short game, historically, is one of the best of all time and when you haven’t played it’s the first thing to feel uncomfortable and the quickest thing to get back.
‘I don’t think he’s going to have any problems. We have all had stretches where we don’t hit it solid and usually it’s just a small tweak. It’s such a short swing that it’s not a hard thing to fix. I don’t see that lasting more than a week or two.’
It took a little longer than that, but considering some feared we had seen the last of Tiger, this was a tentative return to form. If there was a turning point, it came at the 11th on day one, when he missed the green right and saved par with a fabulous chip.
Anyone who had the chipping yips, it was said, would still be there now, trying to get up and down. Woods would have known the world was watching his every tic, too. His golf has not been without flaws since, and yesterday’s round will have disappointed, but his short game was a weapon around Augusta, not a curse.
There had been a practice round earlier in the week in which Woods was rumoured to have outplayed Spieth down the back nine. There was scant evidence of that individual superiority over the ensuing four days and the distance between the pair only grew yesterday but this was never about Woods winning at Augusta. This was about him being back in the game, holding his end up, about him looking like he was enjoying golf, and life, and there was certainly evidence of that.
He will probably need to win a minor before he can land a major, but would anyone bet against that, given the sight of him walking Augusta in the company of the world No 1?
Ready to play some golf? Even when it hurt, Tiger seemed to be relaying that message with every stride. One day he’ll play Rory and it will matter. Maybe one day soon.