The tournament was lost on the 13th green, on a short putt that memory and imagination tell us Tiger Woods always makes. Always.
It’s what he’s known for — for nerve and a glassmaker’s touch on putts that periodically do in other fine players. Just not him.
So to see a 6-foot birdie putt slip past the jar Sunday was, well, jarring. It was the kind of mistake automatons don’t make. So what was this machine doing? Missing.
Tiger Woods was missing. That was more stunning than seeing a 37-year-old, cigarette-smoking Argentinian win the U.S. Open.
“It was just an easy, little putt, downhill right-to-left,” Woods said. “… I just hit it a touch too hard.”
Oh, there was drama down the stretch as he tried to squeeze one blessed birdie out of Oakmont Country Club, hoping to catch Angel Cabrera. He gave himself one more shot at it, one final stab, on a long putt on 18 that would have given him a share of the lead and forced a playoff on Monday.
But this course has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to mistakes. The putt on 13 could not be forgiven or forgotten. The putt on 18 was a long one, but when he missed it, it didn’t tell the story Sunday. The earlier missed putt did.
Woods had one birdie in his final 32 holes. That’s not a stalking Tiger or an attacking Tiger. It’s a tied-for-second-place Tiger, a hard-to-recognize Tiger.
There was no shame in it, just a healthy dose of surprise. Woods is not going to win every major tournament, as much as the marketers and admen want you to believe it. But this one was his to grab, and his fingerprints were not on the lead at any point in the final nine holes.
He’s a front-runner. That is not breaking news. He has not won a major when he has trailed going into the final round. All 12 of his major victories, including his two U.S. Open titles, came after he led after three rounds.
He’s aware of this. But what can he do about it? Book double sessions with his sports psychologist? What in his makeup would cause him to not do as well when he’s trailing? It’s hard to picture Woods giving in to pressure. He shot 2-over 72 Sunday and, like most other golfers at the Open, gritted his teeth and accepted the beating that Oakmont was doling out.
No, this looks more like a weird statistical coincidence than Woods having a problem swallowing when he’s not in the lead. It’s hard to find a whole lot wrong with a guy who has won 12 majors and finished second four times.
“I’ve played well, I just haven’t gotten it done,” he said of his second-place finishes. “I think that’s one of the things I need to go back and analyze. I felt like I played well all week. I putted well.”
Let him search for reasons, but it’s really not necessary. If you’re Woods, you win some, more than most, and lose some. Most people don’t even get to win some and lose some. But he’s an analytical sort. To hear him describe a round is to listen to talk of slopes, angles and trajectories, as if all of it is under his control.
But that’s not how Oakmont works. It decides everything. You might think you know the break on a putt, but it will decide the caffeinated pace. The best a golfer can do with the course is agree to disagree.
So the talk of Tiger lacking something when he trails a major? Silliness. What he often lacked were fairways that were a foot or two wider. The putt on 13 was a miss, not a choke. If Woods were to hire a team of scientists to investigate it, which is conceivable for Team Tiger, he’d find out that humans are vulnerable to heat, humidity, hand-eye coordination and, yes, stress.
He’d find out he’s human. He wouldn’t find out he’s a choker.
Oakmont was its usual soulless self Sunday, and it didn’t lend itself to charges or birdie streaks. It never does. What Woods needed to do was make a putt. You pay a steep price for mistakes here, and Woods’ biggest sin, that putt on 13, would come back to haunt him in the exquisitely painful way a one-stroke loss haunts.
With three holes left, Cabrera had a three-stroke lead over Woods. Cabrera bogeyed 16. He puffed on a cigarette as he walked down the 17th fairway. Somewhere Phil Mickelson was concerned about the dangers of second-hand smoke. Cabrera bogeyed 17. The lead was one.
This was a survivor’s game. And who in their right mind would question Woods’ survival skills? Woods, the picture of health and the best training money can buy, against Cabrera, smoking like a chimney.
NBC kept showing Cabrera laughing as he waited for the contenders to finish. He wasn’t laughing at their pain. He was laughing because he was done. He had found asylum.
He knew what they were finding out: Finishing ain’t easy, brother. Oakmont always gets the final word and the final bite.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
