79 blows, that’s what it took Tiger Woods to navigate his way round Royal Troon on Thursday. Well, 78 in actual fact, plus a penalty drop, but let’s not get pedantic here. Woods’ score, combined with Shane Lowry’s opening 66, was enough to see the R&A select Lowry’s grouping along with Scottie Scheffler’s for online featured coverage on day two. The 15-time major champion has been reduced to playing second fiddle.
Which is fair, of course, and were it not for the fact that world number three and current US PGA Champion Xander Schauffele – very much in the mix after day one – is in Tiger’s grouping, it would’ve been an even easier decision.
Colin Montgomerie made headlines last week when he suggested that Tiger should hang up the clubs, and to be fair to Monty, he’s entitled to his opinion and it’s one that’s shared by many. It isn’t pretty watching Woods, who once played a game foreign to us all, reduced to a sideshow at major championships.
Is Woods capable of winning another major? I think he is. As long as he’s got the distance that every hole doesn’t become driver, 3-wood, he can work his way round. He just needs everything to fall into place and stranger things have happened. That doesn’t mean it’s remotely likely, however. To win a major you need to have all parts of your game in top shape and probably need Lady Luck to smile upon you as well, and Tiger’s approach play and putting in particular, are not up to the standard required.
But that could change. It’s not an unimaginable leap that those four, five and six-footers that he’s been missing all fall, that those wedge shots to 40 feet and become struggles for par turn into approaches to 20 feet and become birdie looks, and that those chip shots that are skidding eight and 10 feet past get tightened up and start coming to rest at three and four feet.
But that’s what rust does. You’re not as sharp as you should be, you start feeling the pressure more, and you don’t trust yourself to execute the shot required. If Tiger is ever to give himself a realistic chance at winning major number 16, he has to play more than four or five tournaments a year. If his body isn’t capable of handling that, then his body probably isn’t capable of delivering one more win.
But even if it’s not, then why should he retire? If Woods wants to put himself through rigorous prep and rehab just to be physically capable of teeing it up and getting it round, then who’s he hurting but himself? He’s earned the right to play, and when he chooses to call it a day, it will be on his terms.
I’d rather not watch him struggle, I’d rather remember him as the phenom he was, as the man who transcended the sport and as the man who inspired an entire generation to take up the game.
But what right do I have to suggest he call it a day? As long as he’s playing there’s hope.
But to quote Morgan Freeman’s Red in the Shawshank Redemption, “hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
Hope may well drive Tiger insane and us all with him, but what if it doesn’t? What if there is one run left in the old cat yet?
“Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies,” wrote Andy Dufresne in a letter to his still incarcerated pal. That’s Hollywood though. Hope will eventually die, and maybe it already has.
But Tiger has earned the right to decide.
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