The Rookies

It was an incredible PGA Championship today, one that saw Tiger Woods lose his first major after leading at the start of the final round. He entered the day with a two-shot lead over both Padraig Harrington and Y.E. Yang. Most people figured Harrington would pose the real threat to Woods, as he won the championship last year and has three major titles to his name. The focus leading up to the tournament was on their anticipated duel, especially after they battled it out at the Bridgestone Invitational last week, and they didn’t disappoint. They were paired in the opening round and were almost neck-and-neck through Saturday, with Harrington cutting Woods’ one-time lead of four shots down to two by the end of the day. Their compelling performance prompted many golf scribes, including Golf Digest’s Dan Jenkins, to anoint their seemingly-inevitable duel as the story of the tournament going into today’s action.

Yang, by contrast, was a relative unknown who only turned pro in 2004. Since then, though, his star has been on the rise. He started on the Asian Tour, winning the Korea Open in 2006 to earn a berth in the HSBC Champions Tournament in Shanghai. There, he beat Tiger to earn a place on the European Tour. After playing well there, he made it through qualifying school to earn a PGA Tour card in 2008 and won his first PGA Tour event (The Honda Classic) this year. Still, he looked relatively unimposing next to the likes of Woods and Harrington.

Harrington self-combusted early in the day, though, finishing with a six-over 78 and destroying his title hopes in the process. That left Woods and Yang, which didn’t seem like much of a contest from this corner. In fact, after Woods bogeyed the 12th hole to fall into a tie for first with Yang, I made a bet with fellow Rookies writer The Derrida Drop that he’d hang on. Of course, he didn’t, which is why I’m the one writing this post.

I had my reasons, though. We had a debate in The Executive Suite last night about the relevance of the statistic that Tiger had never lost a major when leading going into the final day. Rockabye made the valid point that he’s only done that 14 times and it’s been in rather different circumstances each time, so that doesn’t necessarily tell us a lot about his golf game. I agreed that the small sample size means it isn’t the greatest statistic in the world, but I think it does tell us something about Tiger, or more accurately, about his opponents.

To borrow literary terminology, golf’s often seen as a man-versus-nature conflict. Each golfer, or protagonist, fights their own individual battle against the course and the conditions. This can be particularly apt at times, especially in the horrid weather that often seems to strike during the British Open. However, I’d argue that there’s a significant man-versus-man element as well, especially when Tiger is involved.

Like most sports, golf has a sizeable mental component. It’s not just about striking the ball well; it’s also about adjusting for the wind and the course conditions, calculating the necessary angles and power required and plotting your approach to each hole. Perhaps most importantly, it’s about staying cool and composed under pressure. Some of the most skilled golfers in the world haven’t always been able to keep it together when the heat is on, leading to meltdowns of the kind demonstrated by Harrington this year and Greg Norman and Jean Van de Velde in decades past.

That pressure goes to an entirely new level when Tiger is involved. We always talk about intimidating figures in other sports, from the likes of Frank Thomas, Nolan Ryan or Mariano Rivera in baseball and “Mean” Joe Greene and Dick Butkus in football to Roy Keane in soccer and Dale Earnhardt in racing, but such descriptions are rarely applied to golf. In a way, it’s tough for a golfer to be intimidating; he isn’t going to throw a 100-mile-an-hour fastball at your head, drill you coming over the middle, break your leg with a premeditated tackle or run you into the wall.

Still, within the limitations of his sport, Tiger is incredibly intimidating. I’d argue that his stellar record when leading majors to this point is only partly due to his own skill. He’s generally performed well under pressure, and that’s obviously critical. However, perhaps even more importantly, many of his final-day opponents have simply fallen by the wayside the way Harrington did when they realize the stakes. They’re not facing a mere mortal, someone on their level who’s just having a good tournament. They’re facing “The Chosen One”, as Gary Smith so accurately dubbed him way back in 1996. Moreover, they’re facing him on live television in front of a worldwide audience. That realization has a way of turning limbs to jelly.

For me, that was Yang’s real key to victory today. He played with ice water in his veins all day. His eagle chip to take the lead on the 14th hole was incredible, but I was still sure it was the prelude to his eventual downfall. There was no way this relative unknown could hold off Tiger for four holes. The pressure would surely get to him, and he’d make a little mistake along the way that would let Tiger back in. We’d celebrate his day as a valiant attempt, but one that would inevitably come up short.

Yet, Yang didn’t crack, and it was Tiger who started to look flustered. He birdied the 14th to stay within one, and then matched Yang with pars over the next two holes, but he didn’t look comfortable or dominant. By contrast, Yang looked as relaxed as if he was out playing a practice round, not about to complete a legendary upset. The mask of impassivity slipped slightly when he bogeyed the penultimate hole, but Tiger couldn’t make par either, sending them on to the final hole with Yang in the lead.

On the final tee shot, I thought Yang might be about to break. He wound up in the rough, while Tiger hit a typically perfect drive down the fairway. With Terminatoresque precision, though, Yang hit what may have been the shot of the tournament, chipping the ball straight over an intervening tree to land just 12 feet from the hole. Tiger mishit his own approach and wound up off the green. There still was plenty of opportunity for Yang to choke, but he drained the putt without flinching to birdie the hole, while Woods wound up with a bogey that left him three shots back. Tiger still burned typically bright, finishing the tournament in second at a very respectable -5, but it turned out not to take an immortal hand or eye to beat him on Sunday. It merely took someone who could withstand the eye of the Tiger.