John Huggan

Chatting it up about golf
February 7th, 2006

John Huggan is the European correspondent for both Golf Digest and Golf World. He is also the golf columnist for Scotland on Sunday. He lives in Dunbar, Scotland, where he hits many very bad half-wedge shots from around 75-yards or so.

Today Huggan chats it up about Tiger and the "streak".

- GolfObserver editors

Streak or no Streak?

The bickering is getting a little tiresome, if I'm honest. Ever since a still-mourning-Earl Tiger Woods missed the cut in last year's US Open at Winged Foot and set off on what some call a streak and others see as merely a level of performance unattainable by any of his so-called competition, the arguments have been growing in volume, to the point where simple recognition of the genius inherent in the world's best golfer is almost getting lost in the shuffle.

Photo: ©Reuters/WireImage Tiger Woods has done a lot of smiling in the last seven months.

Listen carefully: streak or no streak, Woods has won eight of his last 12 72-hole stroke play events, finished second in three others and, just last week in Dubai, managed 'only' a tie for third in the twelfth.

To be honest - again - I for one really don't care which of the world's various tours the man was blessing with his presence; such a record is nothing short of ridiculous. Where a 'bad' event for Tiger is a spot somewhere in the top-ten, for the rest an off-week usually means a couple of extra days at home. In other words, his bad is as good as most everyone else's good.

Having said that, I also have more than a little sympathy for the point of view that says any winning streak should be continuous and not be interrupted by the likes of Shaun Micheel putting our man off the course in the first round of the World Match Play Championship at Wentworth; by a display of uncharacteristic fragility at the Ryder Cup; by losing down the stretch in China to a relatively unknown Korean; by tossing away a two-shot edge over the last four holes to lose to Padraig Harrington; or even by finishing behind two players of undoubted world class in Henrik Stenson and Ernie Els.

Given such a catalogue of relative 'failure," it is tempting to dismiss all this PGA Tour winning streak stuff as simply the product of over-imaginative imaginations down Ponte Vedra way. But even that lapse into fantasyland is forgivable. Faced with rapidly falling viewing figures, a game that is, through the advent of modern technology, more and more one-dimensional both to play and watch at the highest level and the daunting prospect of selling to a skeptical world the silliness that is the Fed-Ex Cup, one can hardly blame the marketing department at the PGA Tour for trying to sell their ailing product in any way possible.

Photo: © Richard Reuters/WireImage Tiger Woods at the end of the day at Dubai.

Still, for all those caveats, what one cannot escape is the sheer brilliance displayed by Woods ever since he 'found' his swing on the range between the first and second rounds of the Western Open last July. Startlingly, last year's Masters represents the last time Tiger played in an event won by a nephew of Uncle Sam (other than himself). Which, as an aside, surely says as much about the presently pathetic state of American golf than it does the form shown by Woods.

Indeed, while we're on the subject of statistics, here's another: a list of the top-15 players in the world currently contains twice as many Europeans as it does men from the new world. It is little wonder that in a recent column identifying his top-12 players under the age of 30, my friend, Gary Van Sickle of Sports Illustrated, got to number nine before coming up with an American. And even that was a stretch, given how reliable Charles Howell is when faced with a putt that really counts down the stretch. Watch carefully: he always misses.

All of which only serves to underscore the impression that, while no one denies that the PGA Tour is easily the biggest and best circuit on the planet, winning at home is a lot easier for Woods than winning on the road. Well, it is if one compares a slightly better than average PGA Tour field with a European Tour line-up bolstered by lashings of appearance money. Clearly, beating 75 pretty good players is a more straightforward proposition than seeing off a dozen or so world-class performers. A wee look at the last two weeks only underscores such a notion.

Photo: © Donald Miralle/Getty Images Tiger Woods good friend Charles Howell III couldn't beat Woods in San Diego two weeks ago.

Coming down the stretch in the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, Tiger was required to beat off 'challenges' from the aforementioned Howell, someone called Brandt Snedecker, Bubba Watson and the appropriately named Andrew Buckle. Seven days later in Dubai, the top-20 finishers contained the likes of Henrik Stenson, Ernie Els, Thomas Bjorn, Colin Montgomerie, Stuart Appleby, Paul Casey and Darren Clarke. You make the comparison.

It isn't all bad news for the PGA Tour, however. Before we get back to the 'streak or no-streak debate,' it behooves one to point out that if winning on the PGA Tour is so easy, why is it that Stenson, Casey and Montgomerie, to name but three, have yet to achieve it? And, on the other side of the same coin, one must concede that only his inability or reluctance to play the required 11 events prevents Woods from retiring the Vardon Trophy that goes annually to Europe's leading money-winner.

Enough. So is Tiger's present PGA Tour run comparable with the benchmark for such things, Byron Nelson's famous 11-in-a-row (one of them a four-ball event) run in 1945?

It says here that it is. For one thing, although in 15 of Lord Byron's 18 victories in that unforgettable season he managed to beat either or both Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, there can be little doubt that the small matter of a world war had at least some effect on the depth of the fields he was routinely dominating.

But - and here's the rub - can a true streak really have so many defeats in its midst? No it can't, as Woods himself acknowledged when Micheel saw him off at Wentworth last October.