David Barrett

Golf with David
June 15th, 2008

Long-time golf journalist David Barrett is covering the U.S. Open for us this year.

- GolfObserver editors

Tiger is human...sometimes

LA JOLLA, California -- What did we learn about Tiger Woods on Sunday? That he is human, at least until he gets to the 72nd hole with a chance to win or tie a major championship. Then he turns into Superman.

Photo: © Donald Miralle/Getty Images Tiger Woods delivered on the biggest stage yet again when he birdied the 72nd hole to force a playoff.

Woods is not the bionic man. Cut him, and he will bleed. Do surgery on his knee, and it will take him a while to recover. Stage a major championship before he's at 100 percent, and he will struggle physically.

Woods was really struggling early in the round with the knee. He winced badly on his first tee shot, which went left, and the knee practically buckled on his second-hole tee shot, which went way right. He started out with a double bogey and a bogey to quickly fall two behind. Frankly, at that point I was wondering if he would be able to make it all the way around the course. I figured he had too much pride to withdraw, but would he be able to break 80?

But instead of getting worse, the knee somehow managed to get better. Perhaps Woods can even make a sore knee bend to the strength of his will, perhaps adrenaline kicked in and overwhelmed the pain. Whatever, Woods became himself again somewhere in the middle of the front nine and by the 11th hole he had regained the lead.

But he was human in a couple other ways on Sunday. First was putting. His bogey on the second hole came on a three-putt, and until the 18th hole he hadn't made a putt longer than five feet all day (he two-putted for birdie on nine, made a four-footer to birdie 11, and his longest par save was five feet on 17).

Second was decision-making. Leading by one on the par-five 13th, he went for a high-risk second shot that he didn't have a great chance at pulling off when he could have laid up and still had a reasonable shot at birdie. It was even more of a mystifying decision considering that Woods was spraying shots when he had to go all-out, and in this case he had to jump all over a 3-wood from 290 yards. He hit the shot into a hazard and made a bogey, and in short order he was one behind after Rocco Mediate birdied the 14th.

Not that his 72nd hole was pure. When he drove it into a fairway bunker on the left and laid up in the rough to the right on the par five, things weren't looking too good. But then, as he nearly always does, he raised his game to the magnitude of the moment. He judged the wedge shot from the rough perfectly and it finished 15 feet to the right of the hole. From there, he did what he always does when he faces a putt he needs to make--he drained it.

OK, he's missed a few key putts in his career, like on the 16th and 17th holes at Pinehurst two years ago. And he didn't convert the 25-footer he needed to tie Angel Cabrera at Oakmont last year, but that one had a huge break and was nearly impossible to make from that distance. But when it comes to a putt from a makeable distance on the biggest stage, he's money.

I always wondered how Michael Jordan could make nearly every clutch shot when he was about a 50 percent shooter. Clearly, he just had it, an almost other-wordly ability to deliver when necessary. Woods has it, too. You would think that even if he didn't mis-hit one of those must-make putts, he would misread one. But no. Mind and body seem to always be able to block everything out and do what is necessary to get the ball in the hole.

What did we learn about Rocco Mediate on Sunday? We learned that he's a heckuva competitor as well as a heckuva nice guy. With Open pressure at its height, his 45-year-old nerves held up well enough for him to shoot 1-under on the back nine for an even-par 71 which bettered the other two main contenders for the title, as Woods and Lee Westwood shot 73s.

Does Rocco have a prayer in the playoff? I'd have to say yes. First, Woods isn't looking invincible. His knee might not hold up to the strain of a fifth straight day. He may keep spraying too many shots into the rough and not be able to recover. And Mediate might be a guy who can hang in there. For whatever reason, the players who have been able to best Woods in majors are unheralded types like Rich Beem, Michael Campbell, Zach Johnson, and Angel Cabrera. Bob May and Chris DiMarco stood toe-to-toe with him in memorable playoffs. And Woods' human moments have come often enough recently that he's compiled three runner-up finishes in majors since the start of 2007. Maybe he's no longer bullet-proof.

But if they're tied coming to the 18th hole, I'm going with Woods.

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