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Monday, August 21, 2006

A Tiger tale

Seven years ago I went to the final round of the PGA Championship at Medinah, on the outskirts of Chicago.  It was the first (and still the only) time I went to a major golf tournament, and for that I have to thank historian Jeffrey Herf, who sold me the $60 ticket he’d originally bought for his wife after it became clear that she would rather stick really, really sharp needles in her eyes than attend a golf tournament.  Jeffrey persuaded me to start playing golf again in 1997 after a six-year post-Jamie layoff; I wasn’t very good, as you might imagine, but Jeffrey convinced me to toss away my $100 set of used clubs and get what he called “modern” clubs.  Eventually, I got my game down into the mid-80s, where it’s stayed ever since, and after a couple of years of golf-buddiedom, Jeffrey and I went to the PGA to watch Tiger Woods win the second major of his career.  Yesterday, of course, Tiger won his twelfth.  At this rate, he may well surpass Jack Nicklaus’s career record of eighteen by the time he’s 35, which, for you non-golf fans out there, would be a little like hitting your 756th home run with eight or ten good years left in your career.

There’s been a good deal of reminiscin’ about that tournament in the sports press this week, not only because Tiger was returning to Medinah (and an area where he’s also won himself a bunch of Western Opens), but also because Sergio Garcia was in the hunt again.  Sergio, you’ll recall (if you follow these things), lost to Tiger in 1999 by one stroke; he was all of 19 at the time, and his stunning performance on the back nine led many people to believe that he would be Tiger’s primary rival for years to come.  This week, by contrast, the commentariat was reflecting on how Sergio’s game hasn’t gotten any better as he’s hit his mid-20s, and how his putting has become scary-erratic.

But that’s not what I’m blogging about today!  You can read all that in the sports press.  I’m blogging about My Adventure at Medinah, which is full of the human drama of sports spectatorship and ludicrously half-assed mixups between friends.

Just before we were to drive from Champaign to the Chicago suburbs, Jeffrey informed me that he was going to catch a flight from O’Hare on Monday morning, and that therefore we should take two cars to Medinah.  “Um, OK,” I said, thinking only of our planet’s fragile environment.  A few hours later, as Jeffrey passed me on a lonely stretch of I-57 even though we’d agreed that he would follow me, I realized that there was another problem with the two-car system, namely, I had no way of letting him know that I wanted to pull over at the next rest stop.  I put on my turning signal, flashed my headlights at him, and stuck my arm out the window to make heavy-handed “I am going that way” gestures . . . all to no avail.  I pulled off the road, and Jeffrey hummed along the highway, oblivious.

Very well, I thought.  I’ll just meet up with him in the tournament parking lot.  Surely he’ll wait there for me, before boarding one of the shuttle buses that take people from the parking area to the golf course.

Nope.  There was no Jeffrey in the parking lot.  I waited for a while, then hopped on a bus, thinking that maybe, just maybe, he was waiting for me at the tournament entrance.

No luck there either.  Again, I waited 15-20 minutes, then decided to go in.  On one hand, I knew that by doing so I was running the risk that I would not see Jeffrey again that day: if you think it’s hard finding a friend in a 60,000-seat sports stadium, imagine how much harder it is at a 100,000-spectator PGA championship over 150 acres of land.  On the other hand, we had talked about the possibility of splitting up during the day, because we both wanted to wander among different groups: he wanted to check in on Nick Price, his favorite golfer of the moment, and I wanted to stop by and see Hale Irwin, who had opened with 70-69—at the ripe old age of 54.  (He’d faded with a 78 on Saturday to go one over, but still, I thought, attention must be paid.  After all, he’d won his third U.S. Open on this very course nine years earlier.) So, rather than waste any more time waiting for my errant friend, I entered the course, bought myself a mess of sunscreen (I would be outside for nine hours in the August heat), and began to watch some golf.

Now, at this point you need to know two things.  One: I had no cell phone.  (That much should be obvious already.) Two: there is nothing like golf in the world of sports-spectatorship.  Some people follow a couple of groups all day long; some people camp out at their favorite green and sit all day in one place.  The advantage of doing the latter, of course, is that you might wind up with a good vantage point on the tournament’s Most Dramatic Moments, especially if you’re perched around the 16th, 17th, or 18th green.  The disadvantage, besides sitting on your butt all day, is that you don’t see anything but your little corner of the course all day.  But then, that’s true of the wanderers as well: golf is the only sport in which the spectators miss 98 percent of the action.  At the same time, it can be a bizarrely intimate form of spectatorship, as well.  For example:  because Irwin was no longer among the leaders, he teed off (along with Scott Hoch) around 11 a.m. and had a small gallery, mostly people like me curious to see whether he would bounce back; since he was twelve strokes behind Tiger, nobody thought he’d make a serious run at the contenders.  By the time Irwin reached the 13th green at +3, the Irwin-Hoch gallery could be counted in the single digits, and it had gotten to the point at which individual departures were painfully noticeable.  In fact, the person standing next to me as I left the tiny group happened to be Irwin’s wife Sally.  “Gotta check out the rest of the bunch,” I said as I headed off to join Nick Price’s gallery.  “Please tell Hale hello from his fan club.” “Why, thank you,” Mrs. Irwin said pleasantly.  “I certainly will.”

When I found Price, putting on number 8, he was already three under for the day, nine under for the tournament.  Now, at this point you need to know a third thing.  The 1999 PGA was eerily like this year’s in one crucial respect: Tiger was tied for the lead going into the final round (-14 this year, -11 then), and his playing partner on Sunday wasn’t given much of a chance to win.  That player, in ‘99, was Mike Weir, whose appearance in the final twosome was considered a bit of a fluke and who promptly lived down to expectations by shooting an 80.  So, odd as it may sound, people scrambled around the course for about two or three hours trying to find someone who would challenge Tiger for the championship. Garcia got some press before tee time, but, as I’ll point out in a moment, he actually wasn’t a factor until the final hour of the day.  Early on, it looked like Nick Price would be the guy to step up: at -9 he was only two behind Woods, and back then, remember, Tiger didn’t have himself a fearsome 12-for-12 streak of winning majors when leading or tied on Sunday.  As things turned out, only three players broke 70 that Sunday, and Tiger himself shot par 72.  So -3 after seven holes looked pretty damn good.  And, I thought, I might even run into Jeffrey Herf.

No luck on the Herf front; Price’s gallery was way too big.  But as I trailed along over the next few holes, a funny thing happened: Price’s game quickly went south.  No sooner did I arrive in his retinue than he put up a couple of bogeys, and poof, just like that, by the time he got to the 12th tee he was out of the running.  Tiger, by the way, has never adequately thanked me for cooling off Mr. Price (who eventually finished fifth, four shots back) at that crucial point in the tournament.

I wandered back to the 11th green, where Garcia was on the fringe, having gotten there with a miraculous shot from deep, deep, deep in the woods off the left side of the fairway.  You and I would have needed four shots and a surveying team to get out of Sergio’s trouble on that hole, but here he was just 40 feet from the cup.  An older woman standing next to me, unable to see over the three-deep crowd, asked me what Sergio was hitting.  “He’s taking a wedge,” I said, incredulously.  “From just off the green.” “That’s weird,” she replied.  Even weirder was Sergio’s demeanor once he struck the ball: he began dancing around the fringe, absolutely sure the ball was headed in.  It stopped on the lip—but I was impressed by this cocky teenaged SOB who obviously thought that he could birdie a hole from anywhere, so I stuck around for the next hour just to see what he could do.

“Oh my god,” golf fans have said when I get to this part of the story.  “You mean you were there for that legendary shot, Sergio’s insane 6-iron on 16, the one he hit from behind the tree, blind, uphill, onto the green?”

“Not exactly,” I reply.  “By the time Sergio got to 16 the gallery was huge, and I didn’t see him hit that one.  I was, however, about four feet from him for his insane 2-iron on fifteen, the one he hit from under a tree.”

Sergio had birdied 14, and by now it was clear (as Weir had fallen from -11 to six, five, four, three under) that he would be Tiger’s only challenger late in the day.  And weirdly, a Tiger Backlash had already formed on Medinah’s rolling hills.  Over that last hour, Tiger was booed a couple of times, and on the frightful 17th hole someone actually shouted at him in the middle of his downswing.  It was kind of ugly, actually.  The Sergio Surge, by contrast, was altogether innocent: where Tiger was walking the course with his steely, impassive demeanor, young Sergio was prancing all over the place and having a great old time.  Within minutes, it seemed, the gallery had swung Sergio’s way, and the kid knew it.

The only reason I had such an extraordinary angle on Garcia at 15, though, was that he had followed his birdie with a terrible drive that wound up hitting a tree and landing about 220 yards from the green—over 100 yards short of the landing strip for most drives on what was (and is) the course’s shortest par 4.  Nobody expects to see a professional hit a drive 175 yards, so nobody was standing in the area, and I just happened to be walking by the tree (on my way up to the 15th green) when Sergio’s ball hit the thing.  Lucky me!  Sergio and his caddie camped out almost within arm’s reach.  To my amazement, despite the fact that Garcia didn’t even have room for a full swing, he pulled out the long iron and started sizing up his approach to the green.  “This kid’s crazy,” I thought.  “He’s down by one stroke with four holes to play, and he’s looking at this shot as if it were a routine 8-iron from 150.  He’s gonna wind up taking a seven.”

I was wrong about that.  Sergio coolly took a three-quarters swing and somehow laced the ball to the back of the green.

I was stupefied.  “Gutsy shot, kid,” I muttered, and because Garcia was only a couple of feet from the gallery ropes, he heard me—and, as he handed over his iron, shot me a sly look that said, “Gutsy shots are my specialty, old man.” He wound up with a bogey nonetheless: because of his lousy lie, he couldn’t put any backspin on the ball, and it rolled into the rough behind the green; he eventually chipped out and just missed a six-footer for par, putting him two back. 

The gallery, though, was just buzzing madly.  Everyone around me was talking about how this kid was managing to make a run at Tiger while hitting most of his approaches from the leafy shade of the trees, and at one point someone said that Garcia’s style reminded him of another young Spanish player, Seve Ballesteros, who, twenty years earlier, had won the British Open and the Masters in his early 20s in grand, swashbuckling-scrambling style.  “Well, no wonder,” said one fan.  “Seve was his teacher.” “No shit,” said another.  “That explains a lot.” “Yeah,” I chimed in, “can you imagine what those golf lessons must’ve been like? ‘Now, Sergio, you want to avoid these “fairways.” Only timid players shoot from there.  You want to hit the ball where no one can see it, then sneak up onto the green when they’re not looking.’”

The drama peaked at the par-3 17th, when Sergio closed to within one and, upon holing out, looked back at Tiger waiting on the elevated tee, where a couple thousand people and I had clustered.  It was a Significant Glance, putting Tiger on notice, and Tiger responded with a Significant Par that iced the tournament.  And just after Tiger teed off and began walking down to the green, I heard my name being called.  It was Jeffrey Herf! 

One of the other curious things about golf spectatorship is that everyone gets compressed, accordion-like, into the last few holes at the end of the day.  But somehow, Jeffrey had seen me, and immediately we each claimed that we’d been looking for the other all day.  I had the upper hand, however, because I’d been with the Hale Irwin gallery for two hours, and I knew Jeffrey had never checked in with Irwin.  He tried to claim otherwise, but I wasn’t having any of it.  “Bullshit,” I suggested.  “By the time I left Irwin’s group it was Sally and me and Scott Hoch’s parents.  You would’ve seen me.” Off to my right, someone laughed.  “I can vouch for that,” the stranger said.  “I was actually standing with Scott Hoch’s parents, and you”—pointing at Jeff—“definitely weren’t there.”

The story gets more involved, though.  Ten minutes after I’d pulled off the highway to empty my throbbing bladder that morning, Jeffrey had finally managed to realize that I was no longer behind him, and had doubled back on I-57 looking for me.  Eventually he made his way to the tournament, but along the way he got the bright idea that he should stop and call Janet and tell her that I was lost.  Poor Janet, stricken, watched the entire damn tournament looking vainly for evidence that I was in the crowd, as opposed, say, to lying gasping in a ditch in the soy fields of northern Illinois.  Jeffrey, curiously, didn’t tell me that he’d called Janet.  We caught up on the events of the day, but he left out that one, for reasons known only to him.  I learned about Janet’s plight only when I arrived back in Champaign at 11 that night, whereupon she rushed to the door crying, “YOU’RE ALIVE!”

And after she established that to her satisfaction, she cursed Jeffrey Herf for days, because he’d made her watch the goddamn PGA championship on TV.  “You didn’t see me on 15, when I was standing right next to Garcia?” I asked.  “I couldn’t even see Garcia,” she replied.  “He was completely under a tree.”

For what it’s worth, that was a Historic Turning Point for the young Mr. Woods.  He’d won the 1997 Masters in his first appearance as a pro, blowing away the field by a record twelve-stroke margin, but hadn’t won another major since, and people were beginning to wonder if he was, in fact, All That.  He proceeded to finish fifth in the 2000 Masters and then complete a Tiger Slam over the next four majors, adding another Masters and U.S. Open in 2002 and decisively showing that he was All That and More.  Now he’s well on his way to establishing himself as the Greatest Golfer Ever of All Recorded Time Ever, though if he hits another “dry spell” of five or six majors without a win we’ll probably be treated to another chorus of “what’s wrong with Tiger’s swing?” in the sports press.  And then he’ll win another bunch of majors, and people will go back to wondering if he can be beaten by mere mortals.

You know, there are some remarkable sports records that won’t be broken.  No one’s going to come close to Cy Young’s 511 career wins, and Sam Crawford’s 309 triples are probably safe, too.  But Jack’s 18 majors are goin’ down, possibly within the next five years.  I don’t care if you don’t care about golf.  We’re seeing an amazing work in progress, and I’m glad I caught a little bit of the beginning of it.

UPDATE, August 23:  Jeffrey Herf writes in to say:

Michael, what a memory. Let me say to your regular blog readers who may know me as a historian and author that I really am a good guy. Honest. I don’t always make my friend’s wives anxious about their whereabouts. Honest. Really. Actually if my memory serves me right, Michael and I did try to use a pay phone to call Janet but the lines were so long we gave up. Ours was one of life’s many comedy of errors possible in the era before cell phones.

Yes, attending a golf tounament for most spectators means missing lots of the action but for those of you who’ve never stood in the back of a tee box and watched most any member of the PGA tour hit a drive 280 to 320 yards on the fly as it seemingly gets lost in the distance, or hit an iron shot from 220 yards in and less close to the pin, let me tell you it’s quite something to see.

But back to Michael and the comedy of errors. You see I tried, really I did, first to find Michael off Interstate 57. Then I waited for him at the entrance to Medinah. Then I tried to find him following Hale Irwin and hey, how am I supposed to know what Mrs. Irwin looks like. As for Michael, well he must have been using some kind of camouflage. I looked everywhere for him but between wanting to yell “Go Nick” at Nick Price and catching a glimpse of Tiger Woods I could not find Michael. Where or where could Michael have gone? He was somewhere among the 70,000 to 80,000 people on a couple hundred acres of one of the longest golf courses in the world. He finally did show up somewhere around the 17th or 18th hole.

Truth be told, Michael and I had a blast each in our own way. One thing sticks in my mind.

Tiger Woods stood on the 17th tee, a par three of about 190 yards over a deep ravine. I was about 15 feet from him as he got ready to hit. About 10 feet to my right I hear some guy yell “a hundred bucks says you slice.” It was loud enough so I heard it clearly and I was sure Woods did as well. If so, he didn’t let on or give one of those now famous Tiger stares. I couldn’t believe my ears and, not wanting to use profanity or street language there, blurted out “shame on you” in the direction of the jerk of a “fan.” I didn’t yell so I’m sure Woods didn’t hear me. He hit the ball right over the flagstick to the back fringe of the green, chipped on and then sunk a 10 foot putt. In the television video of that PGA, you can see Woods with the big arm and fist pump when he sunk that pressure putt. Sergio Garcia was just one stroke back.

Tiger Woods has not had to endure the hatred and discrimination that Charles Sifford did. Sifford was the first African-American to play on the PGA tour in a game that had been almost exclusively all white and a symbol of wealth and conservatism. But I wondered how many other times some jerk on the golf course made comments like that. Woods was a sensation then, when he was only twenty-three, but he was not yet the master of the game he has become. On the 17th tee at Medinah it was clear Tiger Woods had nerves of steel and the kind of focus only very great athletes and the finest professionals in every profession have. In recent years, of course, no one would dare make such a comment to Tiger Woods, not in Chicago or anywhere else. The gallery waiting around that 17th tee heard that stupid remark and they saw that shot fly straight over the flag. Enough said, as they say.

As readers of this blog know, Michael Berube is a man of many words, and for that matter so am I. So you’ll be glad to know we two sophisticated intellectuals got right to the point with Tiger. We saw him walking away from the 18th green after he won the tournament and as only two PhD’s can we yelled as loud as we could, “right on, Tiger” and “way to go Tiger” and maybe even a ham-fisted “congratulations” or two.

For all of you eggheads out there reading this: if you like to spend time by yourself, if you have lots of discipline, a strong ego, relish success and can bounce back from failure, possess some athletic ability and eye-hand coordination and are willing to exercise and do stretches (this is VERY IMPORTANT) to protect your lower back, then golf is a wonderful game. Yes, it can be a bit expensive but there are lots of fine public access courses and it is no longer a game only for the wealthy. I can think of no other athletic activity that is more suitable for intellectuals and scholars than golf and in which the integration of mind and body is more important.

Medinah in 1999 was a lot of fun for both of us. And I hope Janet has forgiven me.

Jeff’s right, I completely forgot about the pay phones!  And he really is a good guy who scoured I-57 for my missing car—and invited me to join him at Medinah in the first place.  Janet forgave you years ago, Jeffrey—well, two years ago to be precise, but who’s counting?  And while it’s true that we yelled “right on, Tiger” and “way to go Tiger,” we were careful to historicize his performance first.  Always historicize, you know!

And thanks for the plug for the grand old game of golf.  I haven’t played very much this year—just four or five rounds—but did manage my third eagle (lifetime) by draining a long chip on a short par 5 last month.  The real treat was that my foursome consisted of Jamie, Nick, and Janet.

Posted by Michael on 08/21 at 12:16 PM
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