Hoylake, England – Tiger Woods won his second consecutive British Open on Sunday, his 5-under-par 67 concluding a dazzling week and providing the 11th major championship of his career.
However, when his final putt fell into the hole, the control that was so much in evidence throughout the day almost totally dissolved.
A perfunctory hug for Steve Williams soon became the start of an emotional catharsis, Woods bawling into his caddie’s shoulder. After leaving the green in tears, there was another lengthy embrace with his wife, Elin, followed by physical therapist Keith Kleven, coach Hank Haney and then his agent, Mark Steinberg.
The poignant display was, of course, a reaction to the absence of the one person who for so long Woods would turn to first in times of triumph – his father, Earl, who died in May after a lengthy battle with cancer.
“I’ve never done that before,” Woods said. “You know me; I’m the one who bottles things up a little bit and tries to move on, tries to deal with things in my own way. But at that moment, it just came pouring out – all of the things that my father has meant to me and the game of golf, and I wish he could have just seen it one more time.”
Tiger Woods has long credited his father with instilling much of the qualities that make him such a champion golfer, and two of the most striking were certainly on display, both on Sunday and throughout the week.
Woods arrived at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, like almost everyone else in the field, having never seen the golf course that was hosting the Open for the first time in 39 years. However, as early as the second hole of his first practice round the Saturday before the tournament, he decided to, in essence, take his driver out of the bag.
“I would hit a couple of drives and it would go 350, 370 yards – how can you control that?” said Woods, who would indeed use the big stick only once all week, on the 16th hole of Thursday’s opening round. “The fairways become – they’re hard enough to hit as it is, and you add driver and they go that far; now how hard is it to hit?”
The irony of that decision, according to Haney, is that in the Western Open two weeks earlier, Woods “had his best driving tournament in five years.”
“And then he comes here and makes that decision,” Haney said with a smile. “If you hit driver, you could hit the ball closer to the greens, but you couldn’t get close to the pins that way. The rough wasn’t that deep there, but I never saw anyone hit a good shot out of it – the negative was very clear, and we didn’t see where there was an advantage.”
Woods said his father loved to stress thinking his way around a golf course.
Another point of emphasis was performing in the clutch.
“I feel comfortable being there; I’ve been there enough times,” Woods said. “I kept telling myself that basically only Ernie (Els) and myself had won this championship; we were the only ones on the leaderboard who had won majors.”
While Woods may have regarded Els as a possible contender, the South African never really made a move, shooting a 1- under 71 to finish in third place.
Similarly, it was almost certain from the opening hole that Woods’ playing partner on the day, the major-less Sergio Garcia, also wasn’t going to be a factor. While Woods was wearing his trademark power red shirt, Garcia was dressed in a bright saffron number that suggested he’d spent Saturday night either engrossed by the Yellow Submarine wing of the Beatles museum in nearby Liverpool or perhaps watching Tour de France highlights. After bogeying the second and third holes, the Spaniard was never a factor, finishing in a tie for fifth.
The pressure on Woods came from a familiar source, Chris DiMarco. The Floridian has managed to go toe-to-toe with Woods in the major championship cauldron, forcing him into a playoff in the 2005 Masters. On that day, DiMarco was paired with Woods; Sunday, he was in the group in front.
“What goes on with him is hard,” DiMarco said of playing alongside Woods. “I was happy to be in front.”
It showed. DiMarco bogeyed the opening hole but made a birdie on the 202-yard, par-3 sixth.
At that point, he was three shots behind Woods; he made birdies on Nos. 10 and 13, the latter drawing him to within a stroke.
The gauntlet thrown down, Woods merely grabbed it and chewed it up, making birdies of his own on 14, 15 and 16.
“He’s a hard guy to catch, I’ll tell you that,” DiMarco said. “It’s not because guys aren’t trying – he’s just got an uncanny ability to, when somebody gets close to him, to just turn it up to another level.”
Staff writer Anthony Cottoncan be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
