JOHNS CREEK, Ga. (AP) — The kid standing behind 15-year-old Tiger Woods on the tee at Torrey Pines was two years older and already a hotshot himself on Southern California's rough-and-tumble amateur golf circuit the first time he saw the look.
Chris Riley had played the skinny teenager with the
growing reputation a dozen times before. This time, he was 2-up with seven
holes to play in the prestigious Junior World Championship.
"We were at No. 12, a long par 4 and I'd
already hit mine 260 yards. He smoked his 310, straight down the middle, then
turned around and shot me this little smile. He was just fearless," Riley
recalled some 20 years later. "He already knew he had me."
Riley first met Woods when he was 10. He beat him
to the pro tour in 1996 by a few months. Soon enough, though, every other
player on the PGA Tour knew exactly what that look meant.
Mired in the second year of the deepest slump of
his career, Woods didn't scare anyone at last week's PGA Championship. He
looked lost, not fearless.
Not many superstars in the world of sports and
entertainment have fallen so far so fast. Woods was knocked off his throne by a
self-inflicted sex scandal that erupted at Thanksgiving in 2009 and cost him
his marriage. He was quickly — and unceremoniously — dumped by sponsors and
humiliated by the same TV shows and newspapers that once begged for interviews.
Woods went into exile, finally returning to golf in
April 2010 at the Masters with a fourth-place finish. He has been steadily
losing ground in the golf rankings ever since.
Some believe he will never be that indomitable
player again; others, including a few who know Woods better, say it's crazy to
count him out.
"He's always been the best. His dad drilled
that into him," Riley said, "But this has got to be the lowest point
of his career. Nobody has ever seen him do the stuff he's doing now. It hurts
to see it. Honestly, I don't know that he's ever had to struggle.
"But I guarantee you this: He'll be back on
top. And when he is," Riley paused, "it's going to be that much
sweeter."
Speculation about Woods' erratic play the past two
seasons zeroed in on his psyche initially. From there, the blame shifted onto
his work-in-progress swing and then the very real problem with his legs.
"He was the most mentally and emotionally
tough athlete of all time, so here's the question I'm interested in," said
sports psychologist Gregg Steinberg, who was a swing instructor earlier in his
career. "Why did Tiger play last week if any or all of those problems were
bothering him, or if — as the results suggest — he knew he wasn't ready?
"Maybe he thought he could catch lightning in
a bottle. That's one guess. The other would be he wanted to measure himself.
... The secret to being great is self-awareness and so whether that was his
intention or not," Steinberg added, "he definitely knows now that he
needs a good butt-kicking."
Last week marked only the third time Woods missed
the cut in a major as a professional. It happened at the 2006 U.S. Open —
shortly after the death of his father, Earl — and the British Open two years
ago. More troubling still might have been Woods' demeanor over his final few
holes.
As shots veered left or right of the fairway, and
occasionally into a bunker, pond or the Georgia pines lining both sides, Woods
tracked their flight with a deflated expression or simply dropped his head into
his chest. Absent were the trademark temper tantrums and even a hint of the
joyful explosions that once rocketed Woods up the leaderboard at every one of
the game's biggest events.
"Golf is as much art as it is technical, and
that's where his genius was. He always had this spirit, this belief he could
find a way to do anything he could dream up," said Rudy Duran, who began
tutoring Tiger at age 4, about the time Earl Woods had exhausted his own teaching
repertoire.
"I ran into him one afternoon at Heartwell
(Golf Course in Long Beach, Calif., an 18-hole executive course that became
Woods' playground) and he was standing in a bunker surrounded by 50 balls.
Tiger was around 8 at the time. He was trying to hit one out and make it spin
left on landing, then make the next one go right, the next one straight and so
on.
"I only watched a few of his shots this
weekend, but I don't think he's broken," he added. "And only someone
who doesn't know a thing about golf would think he's done."
Duran handed Woods off to another teacher by age
10, and noted that rather than working on swing technique, his lessons
consisted largely of simple tips designed to let the youngster have more fun.
"I'd say, 'Try this to make the ball go
higher, this to keep it low.' Believe me, I wasn't grooming him to became the
best player in the world, but I never came close to exhausting his imagination.
I don't know enough to guess where his game is, but I'll say this: He's not
walking a tightrope between success and failure. That's just silly.
"He hasn't forgotten how to play. And once he
gets a swing he's comfortable with," Duran said finally, "who knows
what he's still capable of?"
Most of golf's greatest champions collected their
majors over 8-10 years and crested the hill by their mid to late 30s. Bobby
Jones retired at 28. Tom Watson and Byron Nelson never won another after 33,
Arnold Palmer, 34, and Walter Hagen, 36. Gary Player won only one of his nine
after 38 and Nick Faldo his last at 39. Ben Hogan was an anomaly, finding his
"secret" after a car crash nearly killed him and winning into his
early 40s.
Jack Nicklaus, whose 18 career majors was the
benchmark Woods set himself as a youngster, won all but one of his over an
18-year span; and that last one, the 1986 Masters at age 46, was what people
mean when they use the phrase, "catching lightning in a bottle."
Woods turned 35 last December and collected his 14
majors between the 1997 Masters and 2008 U.S. Open, where he won effectively
playing on a broken left leg. He's now had four surgeries on that leg and
arrived at the PGA Championship after a two-month layoff to rehab the bad wheel
— and a year into his latest swing overhaul with Sean Foley, the third coach he
hired since turning pro.
"If he works at it, he'll get his game back.
He'll either figure out how to put it together or go in a different
direction," said Hank Haney, who coached Woods the half-dozen years
between Butch Harmon, his first pro coach, and Foley.
"Criticizing the method any of us used,
frankly, is irrelevant. This guy has so much talent, he can learn to make
almost any swing work. And if it doesn't work, well, that's just temporary.
Like I said, he's not afraid to go in a different direction. ...
"In my mind, what happened this weekend raises
two questions: Will his body hold up so he can practice enough to make this
swing work? And if his body can take the work, does he still have the passion
to plow in all the practice it will take to make it work?"
Haney said he and Woods were in touch, either in
person or on the phone, some 200 days a year. In the past, after a performance
such as this one, he might not have heard from Woods for a week.
"If he missed a cut, he'd be so mad, he was
probably back practicing somewhere that Sunday," Haney said. "The
problem now is the longer he slides, the tougher it becomes climbing back up
the mountain. And now, he's already got a long one ahead of him."
Woods has been erratic off the tee since he first
picked up a club. That's why Harmon and then Haney, provided safe shots he
could use to consistently hit the fairways on narrow holes or when a tournament
was on the line.
With the driver, Woods mastered a cut that moved
the ball predictably left to right with a suitable margin for error. On shorter
holes, he hit a 3-wood "stinger," a low, boring shot that flew dead
straight and rolled out with enough distance to keep him competitive.
Since working with Foley, Woods acknowledged he has
yet to develop even one consistent bailout shot from the tee box. That has
increased the pressure on every part of his game.
"Now," Woods said before leaving the
Atlanta Athletic Club, "I'll have nothing to do but work on my game."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/Charlie Riedel)
