The Open 2018 showed Tiger Woods is ready to a win a major again, and you can't help but feel golf wants him to
Carnousite felt electric for that fleeting period that Woods was leader, and even his rivals are delighted to have him back among the elite
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Your support makes all the difference.There will be days like Sunday, where sanity prevails.
But now we can finally believe that there will be days where insanity wins out and Tiger Woods - golf’s modern superstar whose career, by his own admission, might have been finished just months ago - will win another major.
So many people had written off that possibility, and all of them with good reason. There will be those who say they always believed and there remains the distinct possibility that the day never even comes, but what this weekend at Carnoustie showed us is that Tiger, as a golfer, is capable of doing it again and, for the first time in years, the clouds have cleared and he can see the summit of world golf. For a brief moment he threatened to stand atop it.
On Saturday, Woods had declared with a swagger reminiscent of his pomp that he felt that if he finished the third round within five shots then he could win the 147th Open, his fourth. In the end, Jordan Spieth, Xander Schauffele and Kevin Kisner could only extend their lead over Woods to four and he went to bed believing.
By Sunday afternoon, belief had turned to reality. A surge on the front nine brought Carnoustie a feeling unlike anything else all weekend. As Tiger roared and those around him faltered, the momentum was impossible to ignore, the storyline was too huge to play down, the comeback was nearly complete.
It was 3:56pm when the leading group truly clutched together. Four minutes to four when the four shots that had separated Woods from the leaders at the start of the day suddenly crumbled to one.
Spieth bogeyed and Schauffele double-bogeyed the fifth hole as Woods and Kisner found birdies on six.
By 4:18pm, Schauffele had dropped another shot at the sixth while Spieth dropped two, three-putting after not touching the fairway all hole and being forced to fetch a ball by hand out of the gorse.
Woods was tied for the lead, having not led in a major since, well, Saturday, but not since Augusta in 2013 before that. Wearing his traditional red, a product of a long-held superstition, Woods was the picture of calmness, dressed like the glory years, as he strode through the turn tied for the lead with the beleaguered Schauffele.
Little did Tiger know that - now a couple of holes behind him because of the amount of time spent searching for balls - the 24-year-old Californian had missed the fairway once again and was hacking about in the long, unforgiving rough. The seventh hole might not have completely killed Schauffele’s Open bid but it put it on life support and the shots lost here would eventually be the difference between him and Francesco Molinari.
With those around him imploding, Woods just needed to keep playing as he had on the front nine, and he did, but only for one more hole. A tee shot on 10 left him in the sand with those looming, intimidating bunker walls hanging over his ball but that was no competition for a man who was playing with the know-how and skill of one of golf’s greatest-ever players and seemingly with the thrust and fortune of destiny to boot.
Tiger whipped his shot onto the front of the green directly from the sand to send Carnoustie’s throngs wild. Just as Schauffele and Spieth were tidying up their disastrous seventh hole, he tapped in for par on 10 and was the sole leader in the final round of a major for the first time since 2011.
What followed was a blur. A time where people were scouring the history books and researching precedents. Woods was on the march and golf, it seemed, wasn’t ready for what might happen if he were to win.
But a double bogey on 11 and a single on 12 set that momentum aflame. Within no time whatsoever Woods was tied for fifth and Molinari had risen to the top, tied with the Kevins - Chappell and Kisner - and Spieth.
By 5pm the prospect of Tiger winning The Open had completely collapsed and yet that 30 minutes or so when Tiger was in the lead felt like a different world; a nostalgic, drug-induced haze. It was that half an hour that gave an insight into what it would mean for golf if Woods ever did truly get back to the summit and win a major.
Following Woods around Carnoustie this weekend was not a lonely pursuit. Despite being a decade without a major and twelve years without winning an Open he remains the biggest name in the sport and it isn’t even close. Every round of his was accompanied by by far the largest crowds, emptying other parts of the course in almost disrespectful fashion.
He might not have won but, for Woods, this meant so much on a personal level because it was the first time his kids had really seen him compete at the highest level, in one of the tournaments that makes up golf’s Mount Rushmore.
“To me, it's just so special to have them aware because I've won a lot of golf tournaments in my career, but they don't remember any of them,” Woods said.
“So for them to understand what I was doing early in my career. The only thing they've seen is my struggles and the pain I was going through.”
But it was when Spieth spoke about Woods’ resurgence that you caught a real glimpse of what it means for golf.
The young Texan, the man who stands the best chance of emulating Woods’ success, was asked if he thought he’d have ‘to deal with’ Tiger for a number of years now.
“We get to have him competing week in and week out, I think. So yeah.”
Speaking about Woods’ return to the elite as if it is a privilege for the rest of the golfing world neatly summed up the mood around the tournament even as Molinari was all smiles on the 18th tee , staring at his freshly-engraved name on the base of the Claret Jug.
Because while Molinari’s win - steady but unspectacular - was a victory for sanity there is still quite obviously a huge part of golf that wants the insanity that would come with a Woods major win. “It was a blast,” he said, signing off. That it was, and yet the fact we stole a glimpse of something greater leaves the golfing world hungry for more.
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