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Barry Svrluga
A sports columnist with experience in rhythm writing on baseball, golf, NFL, college basketball and college football
When the East Lake Golf Club Gallery was found Sunday afternoon on the 18th fairway, it became difficult to find Tiger Woods within it. Golf is such a solitary pursuit – so often the hole, the ball, the club and the player – that even the most triumphant occasions are normally celebrated in solitude. In as many of his 80 wins on the PGA Tour, Woods has been successful in achieving his goals on his own.
It's an offshoot of the world built by Woods for so long. But a few days after his personal redemption – a victory in the Tour Championship, his first win in more than five years – Woods is in Paris for what should be the most entertaining golf event but which brought Woods, even and especially at its height, the most distressed. On Friday morning, Woods will start competing in his eighth Ryder Cup.
How many times has Woods celebrated with his teammates, spraying champagne and hoisting this mug?
Once.
"We did not do well," said Woods.
It's such a striking statistic, and it's suddenly relevant this weekend at Golf National. Even with all the obstacles – physical and emotional, self-inflicted and not – that made Sunday's win, Tiger Woods has 14 major championships, just behind Jack Nicklaus, and those 80 PGA Tour titles, just behind Sam Snead. Yet at the Ryder Cup he did more harm than helped.
Woods' record at the Ryder Cup: 13-17-3. Remove the games in singles – where he can play, you know, alone – and he is 9-16-1. He was the best player in the world for almost two decades and he regularly beat competitors with 144 or 156 competitors. Yet, with a teammate at his side and two Europeans, he has barely won once every three years.
"Looking back at my entire career in the Ryder Cup, it's not something I really enjoyed and I really enjoyed seeing it," Woods told the press in Paris this week.
[Thomas Boswell: Tiger Woods’s failures made him human, so we all can embrace his redemption]
In a career in the Ryder Cup that dates back to 1997, Woods lost or drew against teams of European stars (Colin Montgomerie and Nick Faldo and Sergio Garcia and others) and his opponents (Ignacio Garrido, no matter who ?). As an individual competitor, he has long held the reputation of a bully, with statistics to show his partners at the last rounds of tournaments that he had scores worse than playing with someone who had not attracted such a gallery. Coincidence? Nobody thought it.
But put it with a teammate, and. . . yuck. Woods lost with Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker, which he can not do this year, because the captain of Furyk and Stricker is a vice-captain, and neither of them is competing. Woods' body and game were in such a state last year that Furyk named Woods also vice-captain, a role he knew in 2016, when the Americans won a thrilling competition at Hazeltine. Still, it's a strange show: Tiger, with a headset wrapped around his head rather than a hand wrapped around a club.
The way Woods enters this Ryder Cup, does not it feel like it can turn? The championship win was a physical comeback of back surgery that made it difficult to get out of bed. But that was also part of a brand change, and tears at choking mattered. It was not the Woods automaton that won the tournaments he was supposed to win with the type of golf he was supposed to play. It was more real and accessible, more human.
Could this make him a better teammate? This is his first participation in the Ryder Cup since 2012. Win a match on Friday morning, and it will certainly be interpreted this way. That would correspond to the arc of his career: People revered the "Hello, World" Tiger who first appeared at the 1997 Masters and showed how he was better than anyone, maybe never , at the U. But vulnerability can also add layers to a character, and Woods has been vulnerable for almost a decade.
It is also possible that everything is outstanding, that even if Woods will have a partner in the first games on Friday, his shots will be hit only by him – this solitary pursuit again. In addition, Phil Mickelson on Woods at the Tour Championship: "It's the best I think I saw him play at the club, even in 2000, when I thought he was at his best."
[Hoping for a Tiger Woods-Phil Mickelson pairing at the Ryder Cup? Don’t count on it.]
We saw his best in the big leagues. We saw his best on the Tour. We saw it so rarely at the Ryder Cup.
This is true for the generation that will lead this competition in the future, for Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas and Patrick Reed, et al. Not only have the young American stars never been teammates with Woods – USA versus Europe, with a continent that was hostile to them – but they have never really faced Tiger competing either.
"I think when my game is there, I think I've always been a tough person to beat," Woods said. "They joked that" we want to go against you ".
"Okay, here it is."
It worked at East Lake, where he took a three-shot lead in the final round and, as his mark for so long, finished. But despite the larger implications of his victory, a continuation of the pursuit of Nicklaus and Snead's ratings, a rejuvenation of the sport in which he remains the most important character, he was essentially playing for himself, an improvement and an extension. of his own heritage.
This week, he plays for himself and his teammates. And if he manages to win his matches, and the US wins the Ryder Cup on European soil for the first time in a quarter of a century, it will go a long way towards bringing about a transformation that few could have expected. one year ago. Tiger Woods, a golf champion, was a long established character. Tiger Woods, champion of the team, could emerge this week.
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