Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

  At that moment, it was clear that the tournament was over—at least for him. In less than two hours, he had shown yet again that he wasn’t ready for the big moment. I wondered whether it might be good for him to go ahead and hurl that club. He tried so mightily to curb his anger—to act like the upright savior golf so badly wanted—but was it natural? Did it make sense, to curb those youthful impulses? Was it healthy, or even instructive? Instead of the tepid whining that led him to slow, agonizing defeat, maybe he should break a club over his leg and come back angry, ready to tear down the course or die trying. Instead, he let himself fade, moment by moment, watching the victory dissolve.

  Kaymer birdied 11 to take a four-shot lead, and though Spieth held on by his fingertips to make par on 11, 12, and 13, the story had already been written—the rest of the round would be an act of suffering. Sensing his resignation, one fan began chanting “Europe!” at Kaymer—a noise Spieth would hear again that year. The German marched off instantly after each shot Spieth made, keeping him behind all the away, maintaining honors on every tee. The crickets started to chirp, the thunder grew louder, and Spieth grew darker.

  “You gotta give me a bounce! One bounce!” he cried on 14, after hitting his drive into the right rough. He turned his head to the woods, away from the gallery, and screamed silently at the trees. On the green, he read the birdie putt obsessively, lined it up, and prepared to strike. At the last moment, the weather horn went off. Spieth’s whole body sagged, and he fell to his knees in frustration. When he came back to the putt later, he three-putted, and another bogey on 15 buried him for good.

  —

  When the weather horn sounded, Kaymer had the tournament wrapped up and ready to carry home. At -15, he had left the field in his dust, and when he returned to the course, he was playing not against Spieth, but against the ghost of Jim Furyk, who had finished with a blazing 66 to steam ahead into second place at -12.

  Kaymer made his par on 14, and simply needed to play par golf the rest of the way to win comfortably. His form had been brilliant up until the weather struck, but as the downpour began, complete with thunder and lightning, it not only interrupted his flow, but threatened to delay the finish until Monday. After ninety minutes, the Tour sent him back out in a race against darkness, and on the 15th hole, after hitting his approach to the left rough just twenty-five yards from the hole, Kaymer made what could have been the mistake of his life.

  Instead of playing it safe and making sure the shot landed on the green, he attempted to hit a perfect flop over a bunker and at the pin. It came up short, landing with a soft splash in the sand. It was the worst place to be, and when he failed to get up and down, he’d taken a double bogey, and suddenly his three-shot cushion had been reduced to one. The phantom figure of Furyk loomed closer.

  The gulls circled on the 16th green near the water, and Kaymer hit his second shot on the par 5 to the left side of the hole. An up-and-down would mean birdie and a crucial two-shot cushion, but facing a downhill chip—not his favorite shot—he decided to putt from off the green. He later called this a “soft egg” moment. He lost his bravery, and paid for it with a putt that came nowhere near the hole. He left himself thirty-seven feet, and could only two-putt for par.

  On the tee at 17, retaining his one-shot lead, he stared out at the island green. So many tournaments had been made and ruined here, and now he’d have to survive the same test. It was, without a doubt, the most important shot he’d faced in three years, and he was between clubs. He couldn’t decide between pitching wedge and gap wedge, but he knew how his adrenaline would be flowing, and he figured it was smart to take the shorter of the two. He grabbed the gap wedge. The pin was in its traditional Sunday location, to the front right, and Kaymer aimed his shot safely at the center, over the small front bunker. Par would be plenty.

  The shot rose up into the gray sky and came down dangerously short. Kaymer watched in something like shock as the ball hit the left side of the green and began rolling down the ridge. The noise of the crowd grew—some were begging for it to stay, but many more watched with the kind of fascination that precedes a car crash. They would have loved to see it roll forever, all the way into the water, and Furyk wouldn’t have minded either. The ball gathered momentum, trickled on, and then began slowing as it got closer to the ledge.

  At the last possible moment, it stopped, held up by the fringe. A combination of gasp and groan rose up from the crowd that remained.

  But Kaymer’s adventure was far from over. He had to stand in the Bermuda grass close to the water, giving himself an awkward chip shot—there was no avoiding it now. He aimed for the top of the ridge, hoping to let it run down to the right and close to the hole, but to his frustration, the ball stopped at the very top. Now, just one shot clear of Furyk, he had left himself twenty-nine feet for par. The daylight was holding on by a thread, and this made it harder for Kaymer to read the putt. He told himself that even if he missed, it would be okay. He could go to 18, hope for a birdie, and at the very least make par and get into a playoff. “Obviously,” he said after, “you cannot expect yourself to make that putt.”

  He analyzed it as best he could—downgrain, downhill, maybe three feet of break. Three and a half, at a stretch. He picked his line, hoped for a bit of luck, and brought the club back. A light rain fell, making soft splashes in the water behind him as the ball rolled to the hole. The speed was perfect, and the closer it got, you could see that the line was, too. Across the lake, the hum grew—was the man who had holed the fifteen-footers at Whistling Straits, and the Ryder Cup clincher, about to do it again?

  He was. The gallery exploded when the ball tumbled into the cup. Kaymer pumped his fist twice—his face flushed and his eyes shone. The German had another iconic putt for his résumé.

  On 18, the last slanting rays of sun peeked through the clouds above the clubhouse, and even those had vanished by the time Kaymer reached the green. The only real light came from the giant scoreboard. Even in the near-dark, the hole was a formality—fairway off the tee, hybrid approach coming to rest just shy of the green, a two-putt from forty-two feet—and Kaymer’s long journey had entered a new phase.

  —

  After his 74, Spieth played the mature young man for the media yet again. “It’s just tough right now,” he said, in the darkness by the clubhouse. “You guys catch me five minutes after the round, and it just really stings….I hope I look back at today and laugh at these moments.”

  When I spoke to him at Congressional, though, he called that Sunday the hardest moment of his career. “I felt like I learned from Augusta, and I hit the right shots,” he said, “and I just got really, really, really bad bounces. I mean, I landed a couple balls right next to the hole, and they were supposed to stop there, and they found their way into spots where I couldn’t even make par.”

  Those words came a month later—a month after he had admired how Kaymer adapted to his own bad luck—and it was hard not to notice his lack of self-awareness. The smart golfers know that if you believe the world is against you, it will be, but the lesson hadn’t sunk in for Spieth.

  A harder one was still to come—in the rest of 2014, he’d muster just two more top tens. Opportunities can dry up in a heartbeat, and Spieth would have to wait until September, at the Ryder Cup, for his third and final moment on the biggest stage.

  —

  The Bubba Wave had hit its apex in Augusta, and washed up in the month that followed. Golf was looking for someone to fill the void, and it happened at Sawgrass. The lost years had passed, and the Kaymer Wave of 2014 had begun.

  After the trophy ceremony, and the media gauntlet, and the autograph hounds, Kaymer got a text from Paul McGinley. Would Martin care for a drink? the Ryder Cup captain wondered.

  He would. They met at a nearby bar and settled in, letting the conversation wander where it wanted. McGinley knew how lonely it could be to win a golf tournament—how empty it feels when you return to your room and there’s nobody there. His compan
y was just what the German needed to wind down.

  14

  FORT WORTH, TEXAS

  Tiger Relinquishes Number 1; Adam Scott, the Aussie King of Texas

  “When people think you’ve got potential, they can be fairly harsh. When you’re busting your ass and not getting anything out of it, you do get tired of hearing it.”

  —ADAM SCOTT, in Golf Digest, 2011

  On we marched, westward to Dallas, Texas, where Brendon Todd won the Byron Nelson, and then to the other side of the great urban sprawl, to Fort Worth. A simple trip, except for the fact that Dallas rivals Boston for sheer difficulty of driving. For anyone stupid enough to brave the highways, like me, there’s peril and death in every direction. Roads merge without warning, lanes disappear, and the minute you start to sense order amidst the chaos, the city drops a random cloverleaf or sudden exit in an apparent attempt to divert all newcomers to Oklahoma or Mexico or back into the Louisiana swamps.

  Colonial Country Club, though, is a sanctuary. It’s the home of Ben Hogan—a sort of Lone Star spiritual oasis for the sport, sheltered from the madness of the home city in a way that reminded me of Augusta, minus the sinister history and the weird lingering paranoia.

  To survive this course, you have to survive the trees. And the trees are everywhere, lining the narrow fairways, their drooping branches obstructing the approach to greens that are practically surrounded by moats of white sand. Burr oaks and red river oaks and cedar elms and cottonwoods and warty hackberries are the culprits, but no tree is as ubiquitous as the pecan, which doubles as the Texas state tree. These beasts are old—so old that Dan Jenkins called them old forty-nine years ago, and today they’re even older, and even bigger.

  Along with Pebble Beach, Riviera, Innisbrook, Pinehurst, and Valhalla, it was one of the most beautiful tracks I saw all year, and it made sense that it played host to the longest-running PGA Tour event held at the same course, dating back to Hogan’s first of five wins in 1946. Since that inaugural year, the tournament’s champions have included Sneak, Nicklaus, Palmer, Trevino, Crenshaw, Casper, Weiskopf, Baker-Finch, Watson, Price, Mickelson—legends galore, with the notable exception of Tiger Woods.

  In 2014, Colonial would welcome the best golfer on earth in his first week holding the title. All through the spring, with Tiger sidelined, the honor of the world’s number 1 golfer had been up for grabs. The rankings take each player’s results from the last two years into account, and Tiger’s eventual fall was inevitable. Adam Scott had been chasing it for weeks, and the irony was that his ascension came, at last, on an off week—he didn’t play the Byron Nelson, but that’s when his point total finally eclipsed Tiger’s. How that happened may seem confusing, which is why I quickly arrived at a good rule of thumb for the world rankings: They make total sense, as long as you never try to understand them.

  The rise to number 1 had been a career-long dream for the thirty-three-year-old Aussie, just as winning the Masters had been before he defeated Angel Cabrera in a playoff at Augusta the year before. Now Fort Worth awaited, where he had the chance to become the first golfer in history to win the “Texas Slam”—he had already won the Houston Open, the Texas Open, and the Byron Nelson, and only Colonial remained. With number 1 secured, he arrived like a king.

  On Sunday, I followed Brian Harman until the 11th fairway, where I heard a roar over my left shoulder and hurried up a small knoll overlooking the 12th green. The noise had been for John Senden, who had just sunk a thirty-seven-foot birdie putt. By the time I reached the crest, Scott was standing over a birdie putt of his own, this one considerably shorter at four feet. It fell, and the standard bearer confirmed that Scott stood at -8, just a shot behind the leader, David Toms.

  He took dead aim on the par-3 13th, hitting his iron over the Trinity River. The twirl of his club meant he liked it, and with good reason—it stopped on a small shelf of green eleven feet from the pin. Framed by the trees growing from the far riverbanks, he placed the end of the long putter in his sternum, gripped it with his left hand, and held the middle of the shaft lightly between thumb and forefinger as he drew back and struck. He missed—barely—but walking to the 14th green, he was one of the few players on the course moving with any swagger.

  “Adam, my wife loves you!” a man shouted as he moved past. He could have been speaking for a whole country of golf fans.

  After a solid drive on 14, he chewed on a bit of food and ignored the cries of “Aussie!” and “G’day, mate!” from the gallery. Wearing his Titleist hat, white shirt with Uniqlo and Mercedes logos, and gray pants, Scott walked with the erect posture mothers dream of when they harass their children. If anything, his torso shifts slightly forward, and his legs do all the work—his still upper body is a living experiment in motion efficiency.

  He didn’t realize Toms had dropped to -8, and he was tied for the lead. Nor did he realize, as his thirty-nine-foot putt tracked toward the hole a moment later and fell, that he now had sole command of the lead. As the air thickened on what was already a humid day, and the dark clouds sent a few speculative raindrops to earth, he protected the lead with par on the 15th and 16th. Dufner, at -8, had just one hole left, while Toms held the same score several holes behind.

  As Scott approached the 17th tee, a loud roar echoed from the 18th, just one hundred yards away. Bleachers impeded the view, but when he reached the green, a digital scoreboard broke the news—the roar was for Dufner, who birdied the last hole to reach -9 for the second time. “That would be a fucking awesome playoff,” a volunteer murmured.

  —

  Why do all the modern Aussie golfers underachieve? Why do they waste their talents, and stumble under pressure, and let brilliant careers pass without resplendent moments?

  It’s not exactly a fair question—and it’s also not 100 percent true—but we’re dealing with perceptions here. For the Aussies, that perception begins with Greg Norman, who is universally acknowledged as one of the most talented golfers ever to live, a two-time British Open winner, and one of the greatest repeat choke artists in the history of modern sports.

  A cruel analysis, maybe, but his collapses at Augusta are the stuff of legend. Adam Scott grew up idolizing “The Shark,” and it’s easy to imagine that the reason he values Augusta above all other majors—and why he would pretend, as a kid, that each putt was for the green jacket—stems from the times he watched the tournament elude Norman. The Masters remained tantalizingly out of reach for his hero, and the sheer brutality of those losses must have looked like a judgment on an entire nation.

  Of course, this “Australian pattern” doesn’t always hold. Steve Elkington took the ’95 PGA Championship with a final round 64, and Geoff Ogilvy won the ’06 U.S. Open with three clutch pars on the final holes. Golfers like these may only get one or two opportunities at a major in their careers, and they went against type by seizing the chance.

  Those examples aside, the Aussie failure narrative mostly stands the test. Stuart Appleby rarely played well in majors, and never won, and the country’s two young stars—Scott and Jason Day—have had wavering careers, with disappointment at the majors undermining their usual brilliance.

  On one hand, it’s tempting to laugh at the whole notion. Winning a normal tournament, much less a major, is absurdly difficult even for the best players, and that’s especially true when you consider how golf differs from other sports. In America, almost all of our professional leagues culminate in a playoff, where players or teams compete against each other in a one-on-one setting, allowing for clear results and a well-defined historical legacy.

  Golf, on the other hand, can seem arbitrary—the “important” tournaments are held throughout the year, during weeks that are otherwise insignificant, and the courses are so different that the advantages to any given player are random at best. Only one of the tournaments, the Masters, is held at the same venue, and the layout there benefits long hitters who can play their ball from right to left, which arguably makes it even less fair at determining care
er greatness.

  That’s the paradigm of golf, and what’s most surprising is that the players all seem to accept it, including Scott.

  “No, I like majors,” he told me, in Akron. “That’s just the way the game’s evolved from whenever they were labeled majors in the forties or fifties. You know, history has shown that the greatest players have ended up accumulating the most of these tournaments, and I think it’s probably a fair assessment of who the greatest players over time have been in each decade and each era. So I’m happy with the way everyone sees that.”

  And he’s right. Arbitrary as the system may be, the accidents of history that produced four majors have indeed painted an accurate picture of the game’s legends. Most critically, the pressure associated with these events has made them important in players’ minds, so that each one becomes a sort of crucible that can only be survived by the best. It matters less how the majors came into existence—the fact that the players accept them as the premiere events of the season is enough.

  That’s why Scott’s win at Augusta was so big. The Aussie Masters curse was over, and Scott finally shrugged the monkey off his back. But for many, it didn’t quite cut the mustard—they wanted more.

  Here again, Scott sided with his critics, saying that if he ended with twenty fifth-place finishes and just one career major win, he’d be disappointed. For players like Ogilvy and Elkington, one major win seems appropriate, even lucky, but Scott had always flown a bit higher. He won his first tournament on the European Tour at age twenty, and as far back as 2008, articles were being written with headlines implying his ascent to greatness, like Sports Illustrated’s “Adam Scott Is Ready to Win a Major Championship.”