Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins is the best writer on golf of our times, but his daughter Sally is a darn good golf writer in her own right (previous posts here). In this column after Tiger Woods’ Saturday round this past weekend in preparing to win the PGA Championship, Sally Jenkins does as good a job as I’ve seen of capturing Woods’ special talent:
Woods is the only player who matters in this PGA, and frankly, he’s the only player who consistently matters in all of golf. To properly appreciate Woods’s performance here, you better enjoy dictatorships because that’s what his reign as the best player in the world has turned into. Woods has reached the point where he can apparently quell an entire field with an imperious look. He has never lost a major championship when leading after three rounds, and his career record when holding a lead entering the final round of any tournament is 39-3, . . .
All Woods had to do to extend his lead in this PGA was stand there and lash a series of steady iron shots. His strategy was to hit the center of the green and lag his putts on an afternoon when scoring was difficult and only five players finished 54 holes under par. His round of 1-under 69 was hardly dominant, but it was enough to stretch the lead over an array of opponents who showed the resistance of Farina. Woods’s average score in the third round of majors is 69; the average score of his partners is 73. [. . .]
If Woods’s legacy lacks one thing at this point, it’s a sense of the dramatic. At his best, his game is lulling, a matter of swing planes straight as the creases in his clothes, and perfect parabolas. It’s difficult to render what he does so well, precisely because it’s so modulated and well regulated. [. . .]
His genius comes without emotional torture; he’s not especially revealing and demonstrative, like Sergio Garcia, or an emotional conduit for his audience, like Phil Mickelson. He’s all about chilly excellence. Greatness is his most definable quality. It’s a peculiar fact that Woods is actually more spectacular to watch when he’s struggling a little, when he has to hit creative recovery shots, and is forced to give up a bit of control.
The par 70 of Southern Hills has at once brought out the very best and yet most unspectacular aspects of Woods’s game. The doglegging layout is like a series of intricate locks. But Woods’s genius here is that he has turned a difficult puzzle of a course into an assembly line. He hits 4-irons off the tee to the middle of the fairway, plays his approaches below the hole and then either makes the putt or doesn’t.
His strategy has been, in his words, “just try to keep hitting fairways and put the ball in the center of the greens and lag-putt well.”
Even his 63 in Friday’s second round, which tied the record for low round in a major championship, was oddly unexciting. The score itself was probably the most interesting about it. His boldest shots of the day were a 35-foot putt to save par on the 12th hole, and his missed horseshoe putt on the 18th. There was no pin-seeking and bouncing it off the flagsticks, or driving 350-yard bombs.
The only drawback to any of this — and it’s not a criticism — is that Woods’s victories aren’t always especially memorable. They might be memorable for his margin of victory, but not for his Arnold Palmer-like Sunday charges, with whooping galleries at his back. This is not his fault, but frankly the fault of his opponents, who have failed to challenge him.
There is a handful of players capable of making noise on a course, who can capture the attention of the golf world for an instant, or maybe even part of a weekend. But when they quiet down — and they always do — there remains the relentless Woods, poised, with his hands finishing high over his shoulder, then twirling the club and letting it slide back down, as he watches the ball descend to another green.
