LA JOLLA, Calif. — So a couple of players are standing around Torrey Pines Golf Course on Saturday afternoon saying that the golf guru business just isn’t what it used to be.
The gist of the conversation was the insistence of Dave Pelz, Phil Mickelson’s much-heralded short-game coach, that in order to be successful on the oft-bumpy greens found on the grounds of Torrey Pines Golf Course, the venue for the 108th national championship, the golf ball has to be stroked with an upward movement.
Such a motion, countered the players, was in direct contrast to the flatstick move used by one Eldrick “Tiger” Woods.
“And, I’m sorry, Dave, but who’s the best putter of all time on these greens?” asked one.
Hours later, there was an emphatic answer to what was clearly the most rhetorical of questions. Trailing by five shots when his ball nestled onto the back of the 13th green, Woods made a 66-foot putt on the notorious blades of poa annua grass for an eagle. When he sank a 40-foot bomb for another 3 on the second par-5 hole of the back nine, the 18th, the world’s top-ranked player moved to top of the leaderboard.
When that putt dropped, so did the hopes of the other 79 players in the field. Besides the gurgling that certainly swooshed through their collective systems at the sight of Woods’ name catapulting above theirs, there was this final confirmation of the inevitability of it all — Woods’ 13-0 record when taking the lead into the final round of a major championship.
“It will take a pretty spectacular — it will take a perfect day, a perfectly clean day, for me with five or six birdies and no bogeys to win this golf tournament — and that still might not do it,” said Rocco Mediate, who led for most of the afternoon before dropping into third place, his 1-under-par 212 two shots behind Woods.
In what is regarded as the most democratic of golf’s majors, it would be easy to root for Mediate to take the championship of the United States.
A cheery, glib 45-year-old who clearly doesn’t have Woodsian talent, and whose career arc has often been flattened by injury, Mediate is one of us, a man just trying to scuffle through the day.
Woods already has 13 majors in his back pocket. Mediate — who led on the final day at the Masters two years ago, only to see his back go out on him — knows this could well be his last, best chance to get just one.
“I’d like to play in three, four, or five more Opens, but to be this close to the lead?” Mediate said. “You don’t know if that’s gonna happen.”
Mediate fell just short of what he said was his pretournament goal, being paired with Woods in the final round on the final day, adding, “I didn’t care if I won or lost.”
That may be the most sterling example of the hold Woods possesses over the game and the men who play it professionally, that the aim is not to beat him, but rather be close enough to bear witness to the greatness. Instead of Mediate, that “honor” will belong to Lee Westwood, who is one shot behind Woods. A stalwart performer on European Ryder Cup teams, the Englishman has had a successful career, winning 18 times overseas and once on the PGA Tour.
But none of those victories has come in a major championship, a triumph that many felt would have been a foregone conclusion by now.
To get his first, to become the first European to win the U.S. Open since countryman Tony Jacklin in 1970, all he has to do is assail golf’s Mount Olympus.
“It would be great to follow in his footsteps,” Westwood said. “Obviously the reason I practice every day is to get into this position and try and win major championships. I’ve won pretty much everything else there is to win, so I proved I can win golf tournaments. But players are always rated on how many major championships they have won.”
In one of those “everything else” tournaments, the 2000 Deutsche Bank SAP Open, Westwood shot a final-round 64 to beat out Woods. If he were to do that again, he could very well join the very short list of players who have managed to win a major during the Woods era.
But it doesn’t take a golf guru to know that, at this point, it’s just not very likely.
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
