Jesus, I thought to myself, that's something I do.
In fact, I always do it before I swing a club. I don't know that it does me any good. Very often, I do it as a distraction and, perhaps, as a kind of preemptive alibi; that way, when the ball goes where it's not supposed to go, which is very often, I have established that I have termites eating my spine or something. Now there was Tiger Woods, who used to look as though he were made of electrified wire, cranking up the sacroiliac the way that I do. And, yes, he'll be 38 this December, but there was a time in which he was so young that he looked ageless, a time in which the future blended so seamlessly with the present that the future looked as inevitable and predictable as the past. I met him then, and the aftermath was somewhat unusual, and this was the first time we'd been in the same area code since the afternoon we had spent together, and he'd had his picture taken, and he'd told some jokes, and had wondered whether or not women followed basketball players because they thought black men had larger penises, and now he was down under a tree, doing the same back exercises that I do. He knocked it a little ways past the hole, drained a putt coming back, and ground out another par.
"Having a chance on the back nine on Sunday, I can live with that," he said later, after flogging an even-par 70 out of the course and finishing even for the weekend, another major championship slipping away. And Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 major championships, which once seemed so easily within his grasp, now slips a little deeper into the mists of an uncertain future. "It's always frustrating going out there, and I'm 3 over today, got to 7 [over], and I'm grinding my tail off coming in just to shoot even par for the day. And I'm nowhere in it."
It was Woods himself who made the pursuit of Nicklaus's 18 majors the Mount Everest of his career, so it's hard to muster up much sympathy for him if he's getting a bit winded in the middle of the North Col. He has won five times on the Tour this year, most recently burying the field just a week earlier. He is the no. 1 player in the world. None of those things matters because the PGA Championship is a major, and he did not come close to winning it, and that is going to be the way his career will be defined no matter how many times he tears it up in Southern California or rural Ohio.
(The cynics in the audience wondered why Tiger couldn't just join the rest of the golfing world and pretend that the PGA Championship isn't really a major but, rather, a John Deere Classic jumped up with historical resonance. Walter Hagen, as the story goes, once left the Wanamaker Trophy in a taxicab and it went missing for years. That was the last remarkable thing that happened at a PGA Championship.)
He walks a burdened walk now, even when it is going well. He walks the same way, above par or below, birdie or bogie. He birdies and he tips his cap, but his head is down. He talks to the ball more when it is in flight — "Get right!" "Down, DOWN!" — than he once did. By contrast, on Saturday, Phil Mickelson had a round so bad he should have been escorted off Oak Hill by the EPA, and he looked like he was having more fun than most of the gallery was. His steps were light and his smile was easy. He did not walk the burdened walk. But he did blow town quickly.
Of course, Mickelson won the British Open a couple weeks ago, and he's not the guy who defined his career success by how many majors he won. Woods was never effervescent, even in the glorious heart of his young career, but he didn't look the way he does now, coming up the fairway toward the green like an aging farmer coming to work in fields he knows are burnt and fallow but remembers with fondness and with pain the verdancy they once had.
by Charles P. Pierce, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Charlie Niebergall, AP/Photo
