GAINESVILLE, Va. — It’s always an odd feeling to watch superstars fall from their prime to become mediocre athletes. But usually, if the athlete allows themselves to hang on long enough, they end up like Willie Mays on the Mets, clearly overmatched, only still trotted out as a relic of a bygone era.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of Tiger Woods’ fall from grace and subsequent career revival is how he went from one of the most transcendent stars in American sports history to being not awful, but just another guy on tour. It’s almost stranger to watch a once immortal-seeming god among men play just average rounds of golf.
Yet, so it is for Woods heading into the final major of the year, the PGA Championship, which begins Thursday at Whistling Straits in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Following him around Robert Trent Jones Golf Club two weeks ago, perhaps the most striking part of Tiger’s game is that he looked, well, ordinary. Compared to his rocky year, he was having a great round, hitting tons of fairways, attacking greens, largely allowing himself to avoid the short game that has plagued him all season long. But he still missed some putts that the old Tiger would have sunk by a good margin.
He also duffed a shot off the tee at 14 in a way I’d never seen, a topspin-heavy, diving humpback bounder that came to rest shy of the front of the ladies tee box, the kind that makes the earthen thud that haunts every golfer. That led to a bogey on a par five, the type of hole on which Tiger has satiated his birdie bloodlust his entire career. But it was the only real mistake he’d make all day.
The crowds that follow Woods around may not be as prodigious as they once were, but they were easily still the largest for any pairing on the golf course. The crowd was still almost entirely pro-Tiger, one that would ebb and flow with emotion on each hole’s result. The contingent of a couple hundred ran two-to-three deep along the side of the fairway. It wasn’t a crush of humanity, but it wasn’t bad for 8 a.m. on a hot summer Friday in Gainesville.
After beginning his day on the back nine with a couple pars, Woods bombed a drive down the open side of the 12th fairway, stuck his approach to 12 feet, stalked his putt like he always does — walking past the hole on the left to the opposite side, crouching, weight on the putter in his right hand as he examines the line, wrapping back around the hole on the opposite side, crouching again, finally addressing the ball, practicing a little double swipe with the putter, then finally taking his putt — and lipped out his birdie.
After the unthinkable bogey at 14, Tiger rebounded immediately with a smart play, backing off to a 3-wood, which left his drive shorter than his playing partners. From 153 yards out, he dropped his approach two feet past the pin, spinning it back within 18 inches and hammering home the first of what would turn out to be six birdies.
And yet, even after what had clearly been one of his best rounds of the year, success felt anything but inevitable. The round put him at -8 for the tournament, within sniffing distance of the leaders two strokes ahead, but he followed it up with a 3-over 74 Saturday, and even with a 68 on Sunday, couldn’t crack the top 15.
Perhaps that’s why his rhetoric going into the PGA Championship sounded as un-Tigerlike as it’s ever been.
“Probably consistency,” he said modestly when asked this week about what he is hoping for at Whistling Straits. “Just being consistent on a daily level. I just need to be a little bit better from shot to shot.”
While that is true, it’s hardly the win-or-go-home attitude on which Woods has staked his remarkable career to this point. When the man who once seemed a lock to break Jack Nicklaus’ record for career majors is just trying to get back to “a level I can practice and play at again,” golf is a vastly different game than the one Woods revolutionized in the last two decades.
The torch may have been passed to the next generation, but maybe not just yet. After all, regular guys on tour sometimes surprise us all by winning the PGA Championship.
