How This Tiger Got His Stripes Is a Fable

INDIAN WELLS —  Wait a minute! I’m not going to swallow this. Whom do they think they’re kidding here? I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m not some chump who would buy the Brooklyn Bridge from some guy in a checkered vest.

They’re trying to tell me some kid known as Tiger Woods (the name alone is enough to tell you they’re putting you on) has just won his third golf tournament in nine entered.

Now, if you know golf--and believe me, if there’s one thing I know, it’s golf--you know that’s not possible. It’s a hoax. A great big adult lie like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or Superman. Tiger Woods, indeed! I know shtick when I hear it. This is a Disney production, right?

Look, I’ve been covering the great game of golf for 40 years, and in all that time I never heard of a guy winning three of the first nine tournaments he entered as a pro. No way. Never happen.

I know this game for the sly, malevolent people-hater it is. I know it for the game that can turn even the greatest into a blob of quivering jelly on the back nine. Ask Greg Norman. You don’t trifle with it. It hates anybody with a golf club in his hand. It can’t wait to humiliate any poor simp who shows up on the first tee in gold pants, a vermilion shirt, polka-dot sweater and a bagful of clubs labeled “Sure Shot” or “Pin Jammer.” It just sits there and nonchalantly knocks his tee shots OB or in the water, it yanks on his backswing when all the money is on the line, it buries his pitch shots in the sand, it pulls his putts three feet off line. It’s an unplayable lie.

So, now they’re asking us to believe this improbable character has come walking out of college and routed the flower of American golf in just a few weeks on tour?!

Gidouddahere! Next they’ll be telling us there’s life on Mars. Maybe they want us to think this is where this guy came from. To hear them tell it, this guy hits nine-iron second shots to par fives and he could chip in from the moon.

Look! I know the game badly needed some big guy to take over the role of Emperor of Golf, now that Palmer’s gone and Nicklaus and Watson and all those guys. Golf needs somebody’s ball to play off of.

But this is overdoing it! Come on, guys! Don’t strain our credulity.

Nobody wins three of nine in this game. Trust me. Everything about this Tiger Woods story is too good to be true. I mean, could you script it? Maybe, some hokey screenwriter--probably the guy who wrote “Angels in the Outfield”--thought it all up. They should release it with that caveat “Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.”

Look! The greatest pros ever to play the game were Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus. Hogan was almost 30 before he won his first tournament. He was almost 36 when he won his first Open. Nicklaus had played for six months before he won his first tournament.

Now, I’m talking about the best there ever was here. Arnold Palmer was 26 when he won his first tournament. Woods has won three tournaments--three of his last five, if you get right down to it--finished third twice and fifth another time. And he’s only 21. That’s almost science fiction.

You see, golf is a sport. But it’s also a skill. Kind of like diamond- cutting. You have to learn it patiently, painstakingly. Nobody falls out of bed with the ability to hit a ball 350 yards. You may fall out of bed with the ability to run the 100 in 9.3 or high-hurdle 11-flat. But golf is much more cerebral than that. It’s not a speed sport.

They ought to frisk this kid for wings, find the mad scientist who put him together, expose him as the hoax or made-for-television flick he is. The pro from Oz.

I was glad to get back down here this week for the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, a game I’m more familiar with, not a game where nine-iron second shots on par fives hit the pin, eagles rattle in the bottom of the cup. A game where a guy wins a tournament one week--and then doesn’t win again for four years. A game where a Bill Rogers and an Ian Baker-Finch win a British Open one year--and can’t break 80 the next. That’s golf as I have come to know it and love it. I’m like that Leslie Howard character in “Of Human Bondage,” the worse it treats me the more I yearn for it.

There’s nobody down here named Tiger. Just a bunch of guys named Mark and Bruce and Brian and Gary--and Nick. They don’t have nine-iron seconds to par fives. They get the wood out. They may not even be trying to win, just make the top 10.

Real golfers aren’t lucky. I mean, look at Norman. Look at Palmer, blowing a seven-shot lead over nine holes in the Open, Snead taking an eight with the U.S. Open in his pocket, a tournament he would never win.

Look what happened to Tom Lehman in that one-hole playoff with Tiger Woods. All too typical. He hit the ball in the water. That’s what happens when you play a Tiger Woods. You turn to salt.

I expect we’ll get back to basics this week in the Hope. Reality golf, not science fiction. I expect last year’s winner, Mark Brooks, fine player that he is, won’t repeat. We haven’t had a repeat winner here since Johnny Miller in 1975-76. No reliance on the gods of golf here, just good solid defend-yourself-at-all-times golf. Approach each shot with dread in your heart, sweat on your palms. No miracles here.

I’ll believe in a Tiger Woods when I see him chili-dip a 20-yard chip shot off a good lie, when I see him pull a three-foot straight uphill putt, when I see him leave a shot in a sand trap or top a ball into a pond or when Lehman is standing there trying to look sad when it’s Tiger’s ball that goes in the water. Until then, I’m unconvinced. As my late pal Bob Drum would say, there’s no such person as Tiger Woods. Of course, I had trouble believing in Babe Ruth too.