Impressions of a Tiger—David Mackintosh
Arnold Palmer won his last PGA Tour title at age forty-three. Jack Nicklaus astonished the world when he won the Masters aged forty-six. Sam
Snead was the world’s rarest bird, capturing a PGA Tour event in his fiftythird year. Assuming competitive appetite and sound health, Tiger Woods
has another twenty, maybe twenty-five, winning years ahead. Unless, of
course, one of those life goals he’s reticent to discuss is to depart center stage
aged twenty-eight in the grand style of Bobby Jones.
My favorite measure of the heart-bumping joy the game of golf has provided millions over the past century is a close look at those background
faces in the enthusiastic galleries great players have always attracted. In the
oddest of ways, throughout the differing ages and differing fashions of the
years, the intensity of their expressions remains constant, everlastingly
frozen in the ecstasy of the moment.
Tiger Woods has given golf fans plenty of these thrilling moments during his brief professional career. By age twenty-seven he had already rewritten a huge section of the record book, but it is without doubt that special ability to produce spectacular seconds of palpable exhilaration that is his
most impressive gift to golf’s overall story.
Hogan’s legacy is immortalized as a two-iron to the eighteenth green at
Oakland Hills. A plaque marks the spot where Palmer’s massive swipe from
Royal Birkdale’s deep rough won the 1961 Open. Watson’s seventeenthhole chip-in at Pebble Beach made more than one photographer’s fortune.
Sarazen’s Augusta double-eagle echoed around the world.
But Woods! Has there been a major championship in recent years—
indeed has there been a single tournament—without some extraordinary
feat? Sometimes it is pure awesome and unadulterated power, frequently
an exquisitely struck ball, flighted so pure and true the golfing heart veritably soars. Occasionally it is one of these delicate little inventions that
defies gravity, logic, or reason but finishes beside the flagpole, to the
bewitchment and amazement of millions.
The most terrifying part for his rivals: Tiger is just beginning to discover
there are no limits in golf. Ben Hogan used to dream of the perfect round
with eighteen single putts. Tiger is as likely to do that as he is to shoot 58.
Maybe next week . . . maybe any week! Without the slightest doubt Eldrich
Woods is the most remarkable player of his time. Tiger’s place in history is
yet to come. All we can do right now is marvel on the sidelines, thankful
to be part of it.
Unquenchable Thirst for History—Jim Huber*
The warmth of the Kentucky summer day was grudgingly giving way to
dusk. If you really squinted, you could make out the flags at the end of the
driving range, and a mist was beginning to turn the green gray. Three men
stood, silently, at the far left. Three more stood just as far to the right. Farther to the right, I was preparing to do a commentary for a half-hour show
that would wrap up that day’s third round of the PGA Championship. A
cameraman and his sound technician were my only partners.
On the left, Tiger Woods continued a furious attempt at deflating every
single range ball left in the Valhalla barrel. His coach, Butch Harmon, stood
198 Golf’s Greatest Eighteen
*Jim Huber is an essayist, commentator for Turner Sports, and author of A Thousand Goodbyes: A
Son’s Reflection on Living, Dying and the Things That Matter Most.
behind him. His caddy, Steve Williams, was to his left. Though he would
take the overnight lead to Sunday, as he had at Pebble Beach and St.
Andrews thirty and sixty days previous, he beat those golf balls as though
he trailed by a dozen, as if seeking his first victory somehow, some way.
When the remaining sunlight became too faint for any definition, my cameraman focused a light behind me on the tiny chipping green. With a light
on me and another backlighting, we became a target.
Thump!
I could no longer see Tiger from my position, but I suddenly heard his
intent. Because he couldn’t see into the range itself, he had begun lobbing
wedges over our heads onto the chipping green.
Thump! Thump!
It felt a bit like what my news colleagues must go through in a war zone,
their camera lights attracting stray or intended incoming shots. Somehow
I felt a bit more comfortable than they must but could not help shaking
my head in amazement.
It was nearly 9:00 p.m., and yet here he remained, in the closing stages
of arguably the greatest summer in the history of professional golf, still at
work. When we extinguished our lights, our job finally done, Tiger and his
men packed their bag and moved to the lighted putting green behind the
range bleachers. More work to be done.
There were dozens chasing him into Sunday, that many with a chance
to overtake him and finally derail this runaway train, and yet all of them
were elsewhere, relaxing, their day long, long-ago done.
I don’t know if Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time. That
remains for someone who has seen them all, to be able to somehow judge.
Would they throw him a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in honor of a
Grand Slam? They had their chance, in a convoluted way, and chose to save
their tape. If, then, that is the criterion, it must be Jones instead. Has he
won nineteen majors yet? Not by the kindest of counts, and so it must be
Nicklaus. Has he won out of a hospital bed? It must be Hogan then. Has
he won a hundred tournaments yet? It is surely Snead then. Who can say?
Who would presume to put hickory against steel, pastures against landscapes, round rocks against two-piece darts? All I can say is that I have seen
a work ethic that would certainly stand up against anyone who has ever
challenged the game. Dark doesn’t faze him, for he finds his light in the
strangest of places.
Above and Beyond • Tiger Woods 199
We talk of the summer of ’00 as some kind of magical mystery tour, but
there was neither magic nor mystery involved. Well, perhaps a bit of magic
when balls happen to bounce in the most provincial of ways . . . and perhaps a wee bit of mystery the next evening at Valhalla and a few weeks later
from a Canadian bunker. But hard work makes both of those happen.
Combine that with remarkable, God-given talent and an unquenchable
thirst for history, and it would be very difficult to find anyone in the game’s
history any better.
Thunk!
Graceful Predator—John Strawn*
Tiger Woods stalks the links with predatory grace. In India, where maneaters still lurk, the last man in the parade of villagers walking home from
the fields at dusk wears a mask on the back of his head in hopes that the
tiger, who pounces from the rear, will falter at the sight of the staring eyes,
mistaking to for fro.
But no such subterfuge will work on the golf course, where Tiger attacks
from the tee, from the rough, from the fairway, from the bunker, from the
front and the side and the rear, from all imaginable realms. Prey species,
the biologists say, will freeze in a kind of painless ecstasy in the clutches of
a predator. Tiger’s rivals, too, succumb to a superior force, but with the
pained realization that nothing can protect them. Tiger’s opponents have
the look of refugees, the hopeless gaze of the displaced. Tiger’s dominance
has the force of nature.
