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And so, having finally discovered Tiger Woods' weakness, we should anticipate having it beaten to death in all future discussions about the fellow, right? For it is the way of our people.
Woods' failure to beat Angel Cabrera in one of the most challenging U.S. Opens ever fell right into the recent discovery that Woods has never come from behind on the final day to win a major championship. Squat-for-29, they say. Proof that Woods is actually only a good front-runner.
And it is true. An unassailable fact, with numbers and everything.
But the remarkable thing about that statistic is that it took so long to find.
Oh-for-29 would be a more meaningful number if we had figures on every other player of the Woods Era to see just how hard it is to accomplish this feat. Right now, it stands like the old chestnut about a baseball team's record when leading after 8 innings. You'll see that a team is 25-4 and you'll think, boy, that's mighty impressive, and then you find out the worst team is 24-5. The great likelihood is that most players' records coming from behind on the final day are awful. Angel Cabrera, for example, is 1 for a bunch.
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| Woods has never come from behind on the final day to win a major title. (Getty Images) |
How will he handle being married to Elin Nordgren?
How will he handle being a father?
How will he deal with his father's death?
How will he handle passing Jack Nicklaus?
We have some answers, as in (a) and (c), but the rest is guesswork. Mostly he has absorbed challenges the way any planet-eating science fiction creature would -- with a burp and a stoic expression.
But after long and hard analysis, which really did take quite a long time to unearth when you think of how hard we have been looking for proof of Woods' fallibility, we finally have something, and it really isn't much of an anything.
Plus, we discovered it at a time when it actually means the least.
