One on One

by John Feinstein

  He smiled. “Turns out I was wrong.”

  Duval never did anything the easy way in golf. In 1993, coming out of Georgia Tech as a four-time All-American, he didn’t make the cut at Q School and had to play on the (then) Nike Tour for a year. When he made it to the tour a year later, he was instantly in the hunt at a number of tournaments, finishing second several times. But it wasn’t until October of 1997, at the end of his third year on tour, that he finally won. Then he won three times in a row.

  The same proved to be true in his quest to win a major. He almost always seemed to be in contention but he couldn’t break through. Finally, in the summer of 2001, he played a transcendent final round in the British Open, shooting 67 at Royal Lytham and St. Anne’s, pulling away from the field to win by three shots. All of his dreams, dating to boyhood, had come true.

  And then he stopped winning. In fact, he stopped contending. After a while he stopped playing golf altogether for long stretches of time.

  “It’s hard to explain because it’s hard for me to understand,” he said. “There was something existential going on. When I won at Lytham, the feeling was unbelievable. I felt satisfied and complete. I had done what I had worked my whole life to accomplish.

  “And then, within a few weeks, I found myself thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I worked my whole life, spent all those hours on driving ranges, in bunkers, out in the rain all by myself, for this?’ Now, I can’t even tell you exactly what this is, but I can tell you once the initial euphoria wore off, I felt kind of empty. I went to the PGA that year [at Atlanta Athletic Club] and was actually playing well enough that I could have won again. But there was no extra gear in me. I looked for it, tried to find it, but it wasn’t there.

  “To be fair, part of it was Tiger. At some point it occurred to me that I simply wasn’t in his class as a golfer. I’m not being modest. I think I’m really, really good at golf—maybe even great at times. Phil [Mickelson] is great at golf and so are Ernie [Els] and Vijay [Singh] and a handful of other players. You know who they are because most are in the Hall of Fame or will be. I mean they’re absolutely fantastic golfers. I’ve been, at times, in their league.

  “But none of us—I mean none of us—are in Tiger’s league. Comparing any of us to him is like comparing a very, very good painter to Van Gogh or Picasso. He just did things out there none of the rest of us could do. Period.”

  Like a lot of players, Duval knew for certain just how great Woods was during the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. “Look back at the history of majors,” Duval said. “Most are won by a shot or two or maybe in a playoff. I played the round of my life at Lytham and won by three. That was considered a runaway. He beat everyone in the field by an average of just under four shots a day. Think about that. The guys who finished second [Els and Miguel Ángel Jiménez] averaged what—72 shots a day? [71.75 to be exact]. He averaged 68 shots a round on a very hard golf course under U.S. Open pressure. That’s simply ridiculous. Then he came back a few weeks later and won at St. Andrews by eight.

  “So I accepted at some point along the way that I wasn’t going to be as good as Tiger. That didn’t mean I couldn’t beat him—I did it at Lytham. But that was okay. Then, when I won the Open Championship [like almost everyone who has won the British, Duval refers to it the way they do in Great Britain, as “The Open Championship”], something definitely happened to me. It wasn’t so much “Is that all there is?” I got plenty tangibly from winning. But none of it made me any more happy than I had been. I think I expected that it would, that I would feel some extra sense of fulfillment that would make me happier in my daily life.

  “It didn’t. What occurred to me then was that golf wasn’t ever going to do that for me. It had to come from someplace else. Fortunately for me, it did.”

  A year after his win at the British, Duval and his longtime girlfriend, Julie McArthur, broke up. Most people in golf had assumed they would get married at some point since they had been together since Duval first came on tour. A year later, Duval and a friend were waiting for a table in a Denver restaurant during the International Tournament—another event that no longer exists—when they struck up a conversation with two women who were sitting at the bar. One was Susan Persichitte, and Duval was instantly smitten.

  “I’m not usually the most outgoing guy with people I don’t know,” he said. “But for some reason I felt comfortable with Susie right away.”

  He managed to get her phone number that night and made up an excuse to come back to Denver so he could go out with her. Things moved quickly. They met in August; in November they were engaged. It wasn’t long after he got engaged that Duval decided he needed a break from golf. He just had no desire to compete. He’d battled injuries throughout 2003 and had dropped to 211th on the money list. Because of his British Open win, he was exempt for five years—through 2006—so he could afford to take time off and not lose his exempt status.

  “At that point in my life I was just happier being at home with Susie and the kids [she had three when they got married, and they have had a boy and a girl together since then] than I was being away at golf tournaments,” he said. “Part of it, no doubt, was that I wasn’t playing well. But it was also that feeling I had after the British. Did I really want to work that hard to do something that didn’t, in the end, mean that much to me?

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m very proud of winning that championship—very proud. And now, at this point in my life, I’d like to win another. I’d like to win on tour again. But for a while it was hard to make any of that a priority.”

  As often happens with athletes when something they have taken for granted suddenly becomes jeopardized, Duval’s desire to play began to come back at just about the same time that he couldn’t necessarily just show up anyplace he wanted to and tee it up. He had finished 80th on the money list in 2002, but didn’t come close to the top 125 the next four years. In 2007 he began the year playing on an exemption as one of the top 25 money winners of all time. He only played seven times before leaving the tour again for personal reasons: his mom was dying of cancer and Susie was having a very tough second pregnancy.

  The tour ended up granting him a “major medical exemption” for 2008 under a newly created category: family crisis. Many players had been campaigning for this sort of exemption for years, among them Paul Goydos, who had asked for that sort of exemption when he had dropped off the tour in 2004 to take care of his daughters while Wendy was in and out of drug rehab. It had taken a while, but the tour had finally gotten around to it.

  By 2009, Duval was down to his last exemption: he was still among the top fifty money winners of all time, so he was able to take a second exemption in the all-time money category. Early that year I ran into him on the putting green at the Honda Classic. In the midst of exchanging pleasantries about family and the usual talk about who was going to win the NCAA basketball tournament, David looked at me and said, “Remember that I said this: I’m going to win again soon. It’s not that far away. I know it’s close now.”

  Athletes say this all the time. But Duval had never said anything like that to me before. I remembered that comment a few months later when he almost won the U.S. Open at Bethpage—finishing tied for second, two shots behind Lucas Glover. To say that he came out of nowhere is putting it mildly: he had to go through qualifying to get into the field and began the tournament ranked 882nd in the world. He had gone from 1st to 882nd. People talk about Tiger Woods dropping like a stone since his “accident” in November of 2009. Going into the 2011 PGA Championship he was ranked number 21 in the world. That’s a pretty fair distance from number 882.

  If Duval had won it would have been one of the great comeback stories in the history of sports. As it was, it became his first top-ten finish on tour since 2002. He couldn’t keep it going though and just missed finishing in the top 125 on the money list—finishing 130th. That meant, for the first time since 1994, he began a year without any kind of full exemption on tour.

  “I�
��ve been forced to depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said that night at dinner, definitely becoming the first golfer I had ever heard quote Tennessee Williams. “Right now, my goal is to avoid that next year.”

  Just as in 2009, he was fighting to make the top 125. He had started the year well, tying for second at Pebble Beach, but had dropped out of the top 100 with the year dwindling to a few weeks. And yet he wasn’t at all discouraged.

  “I still think I have a lot of good golf left in me,” he said. “I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t believe that. Every week when I leave my kids to come back out here it’s tough and it isn’t going to get any easier the next few years with Brady [age 5] and Sienna [age 2].

  “But I want to win out here again, and I still honestly believe I have another major in me. If I had doubts about that, they went away at Bethpage. I can still play well enough to win in a major, and if I do I think I’ll appreciate it more if only because I won’t expect so much from it. I’ll enjoy it. I want my kids to see me at my best because at my best I was pretty damn good.”

  One week after our dinner, Duval finished tied for sixth in the Frys.com Open and clinched his tour card for 2011. He ended up 106th on the money list, his highest finish since 2002. He still hasn’t won since that British Open victory in 2001, and there’s no way of knowing whether he will ever win again. He turned forty in November of 2011.

  There’s one thing though I’m pretty certain of: if Duval does win again, his reaction won’t be existential. It will be ecstatic.

  I DON’T THINK I would say the same thing about Tiger Woods.

  I was watching a college basketball game on the day after Thanksgiving in 2009 when the first crawl came across the TV screen: “Tiger Woods was involved in a car accident early this morning. Reports are that it was ‘not serious.’ ”

  Most of me shrugged at the report. I understood that Tiger Woods going to the store for milk was news at that point in time. He had long ago surpassed Michael Jordan as the most famous person on earth. The three words that stayed with me as the crawl repeated itself were “early this morning.”

  Was that at seven o’clock in the morning while, perhaps, making a run to the Isleworth 7-Eleven? (I doubt that Isleworth has a 7-Eleven, but whatever.) Finally, when I needed to stand up for some reason, I went to my computer to see if there were details about the accident. That’s when I saw the time and the place—2:27 a.m., just outside his house—and the fact that it was a one-car accident.

  Okay, now there were questions to be answered, the first one being, what was Tiger Woods doing coming in, or going out, at 2:27 a.m. on the morning after Thanksgiving? And what kind of one-car accident could he have gotten into a few yards from the front door of his house?

  We all know the answers now, or at least some portion of the answers. Exactly why Woods fled from his house at that hour and whether he was on Ambien or painkillers that caused him to hit the now-famous fire hydrant have never been completely answered. What we do know are the basics: he was cheating on his wife and he got caught.

  As the days and weeks went by we learned that he hadn’t just cheated on his wife, he had cheated on her—over and over and over again. Whether he was addicted to the sex or the chase or even the danger—being the public figure he was—none of us will ever really know. And, in truth, it doesn’t really matter.

  His image will never be the same whether he never wins another golf tournament or wins thirty more golf tournaments and a half-dozen more majors. Woods worked just about as hard on cultivating his image—boy next door, husband, dad, all-around good guy—as he worked on his golf. There are some who believe, and I don’t disagree, that getting married was another step in the Selling of Tiger. He was closing in on thirty, it was time to marry a beautiful blonde and start having beautiful little children (and a dog) he could put up on his website and hug after victories.

  That sounds so incredibly cynical the temptation is to not even write the words. But even though I don’t “know” Tiger the way some of my colleagues claim to “know” him, it fits with what I’ve seen and heard through the years. Perhaps the most laughable part of a story that was decidedly unfunny was the notion that his father’s death in 2006 somehow had set these events in motion.

  Oh please.

  Who do you think it was who set the example that Tiger followed? If anything, Tiger’s issues—and he’s got a boatload of them—almost certainly stem from his relationship with his father. That hardly makes him unusual; a lot of people are formed for good and bad by their relationships with their parents. But the idea that things might have been different if Earl had been alive is patently absurd.

  Among the almost uncountable mistakes Tiger and his “team” have made since he plowed into the hydrant, the most inexplicable may have been that awful Nike commercial that was released the day before Tiger came back from his leave of absence to play in the 2010 Masters. Even putting aside the tastelessness of somehow bringing Earl back from beyond the grave to “talk” to Tiger, the whole idea that anyone might buy into the “sainted Earl” storyline anymore was flat-out stupid.

  In the Saturday Night Live takeoff on the commercial, “Earl” says to “Tiger,” “It goes without saying, I’m sure, that you would never use my voice to sell sneakers… in the wake of a sex scandal.”

  Yup, that’s exactly what they were doing.

  Raking Tiger over the coals again is pretty pointless. The only reason I come back to it is the extraordinary fiction that there might somehow be a “New Tiger” in the wake of all that has happened. There is no more a New Tiger than there was ever a New Nixon. Tiger Woods and the people around him are sorry about one thing: that he got caught.

  From day one they mishandled everything that could be mishandled, from refusing to talk to the police the first weekend to the pathetic Tiger-and-pony show they staged when he gave his mea culpa speech—only to interrupt himself to indignantly scold the media for hounding his wife and children. The fact that the golf media had fawned over him for years was apparently irrelevant. Even less important in Tigerworld was the fact that his behavior had brought about the harassment of his wife and his children by the tabloid media.

  Honestly, having been asked the question several thousand times now, I have no idea whether Woods will come back and break Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major titles, and I honestly don’t care. If he does, fine. If he doesn’t, fine. Yes, he did great things for golf: sponsorships, TV ratings, purses all skyrocketed in the Tiger Era. But let’s be honest. He didn’t do any of these things on purpose. All he was trying to do was do good things for Tiger. There’s nothing wrong with that; just don’t sell yourself as something you’re not and have no intention of becoming.

  I feel sympathy for Tiger for one reason: much like Bob Knight, he is one of the least happy people I’ve ever met. For all his brilliance on the golf course, I never saw any real joy. Oh sure, there were the fist pumps after made putts, the momentary rush of happiness because he had won—or just as important—hadn’t lost.

  One story that sums Tiger up is told by Trey Holland, a former USGA president who was also the USGA’s top rules official for many years. Holland was walking with Woods during the last round of the Open at Pebble Beach in 2000, arguably his greatest performance ever. On I believe the second hole, Tiger wanted a drop of some kind and asked Holland for a ruling. Holland didn’t give him the drop, and Tiger ended up winning by fifteen shots instead of sixteen.

  Walking off eighteen a few hours later, when Holland congratulated him, Tiger looked at him and said, “I really wish you’d given me that drop.”

  Holland told the story later as an example of Tiger’s competitiveness, which it certainly was. But it’s also an example of the fact that in the moment of his greatest triumph he couldn’t help but think about a minor incident that in no way affected his victory. My guess is when Tiger thinks of Trey Holland that’s what he thinks about—not the fact that Holland was a witness to perhaps the great
est display of golf anyone has ever seen.

  Great competitors are always looking ahead to the next challenge. I get that. But I’m not sure Tiger ever paused for more than a few minutes to enjoy anything he achieved. That’s sad.

  The saddest thing in all of this, other than what he did to his children, was that there was actually a chance for Woods to walk away from that accident a different person. Remember the last scene in The Bridge Over the River Kwai, when the realization hits Alec Guinness that he’s been co-opted by the Japanese, and as he says, “Oh my God, what have I done?” he manages to fall on the detonator and blow up the bridge?

  What if realization had somehow hit Tiger that morning? What if he’d walked out of the hospital and said, “Oh my God, what have I done?” What if he’d decided to stop doing everything just for himself and done a few things for others: played in a few tournaments not on his regular schedule, done charity work for something other than his self-promoting foundation, taken, say, a solid hour each day (Phil Mickelson takes forty-five minutes) to sign autographs at tournaments, and stopped trying to convince people that the minute he put on his bracelet engraved with words from Buddha he was transformed?

  What if any of that had happened? Jockworld always forgives its heroes. Many people have forgiven Tiger anyway because he gave them so much enjoyment—far more than he ever gave himself—with his golf. That’s fine.

  Here’s hoping, seriously, that at some point in his life he can find joy in something other than stepping on people’s necks and filling his pockets with money. I don’t think it is close to happening right now. And I never thought wearing that bracelet was going to make it happen either.

  Apparently, he agrees. He no longer wears it.

  24

  Hoopsters

  AS MUCH AS I love covering golf and being around baseball and watching tennis and walking into the stadium on the morning of Army-Navy, I always seem to come back to college basketball—in spite of all its flaws.