Growing While He’s Growling

His waist is still a size 28, but Tiger Woods is bigger and stronger now. He has done a lot of weightlifting since 1997, the Year of the Tiger, began.

At the fourth hole Saturday of the Skins Game--his last tournament of the year--somebody in the gallery yelled, “Drive it.” The cup was 360 yards away.

Tiger took a two-iron.

For a few seconds, the audience at Rancho La Quinta was all in a twitter. But as it turned out, Woods was laying up. Even he has limits.

“The only way I can get there is downwind,” he explained. “There’s no sense going for it on a calm day. I need a gale.”

Last year here, Woods did go for it. At a pro-am round, he put his tee shot in a greenside bunker, cup-high.

“So, it can be done,” he said.

Where is El Nino when you need it? Where are those Santa Anas when a golfer wouldn’t mind a little gust from the gods?

Without it, Woods played it safe. He laid up, then knocked a sand wedge onto the small, elevated green, 10 feet from the flag.

“Of course, you’ll notice he did hit it 375 yards on the hole after that,” his opponent and bosom buddy Mark O’Meara pointed out.

That was the fifth hole of the day, a 589-yarder.

Or thereabouts.

Upon reaching the tee, Woods noticed where the markers had been set. They weren’t as far back as they could be, where Tiger figured they belonged.

You don’t often see a golfer run, but Woods did. Dashing up to a tee marker, he snatched it from the ground and carried it like a football, toward the rear of the tee.

“It’s a par five!” Tiger said later, enjoying a rare day when golf was more fun than work. “Don’t place it up there! Get that tee back!”

These young, long hitters, they don’t much care where a hole begins or ends. Make it 600 yards. Make it 700.

Woods stuck a Skins needle into O’Meara, his 40-year-old pal.

“There are semi-senior pros here,” Tiger teased him.

Coming into 1997 like a lion and going out like a lamb, Woods looks and sounds like a man who is finally able to enjoy the best year of his life, after a helter-skelter first full year of pro golf.

It wasn’t all fun and games. There were the crowds, the flashbulbs, the snoops, the pressures of short putts and huge expectations.

Asked if he was indeed enjoying life more than a year ago, Woods, who won’t even turn 22 until a month from today, answered, “In some respects, yes. In other respects, no. I love traveling. I love going to new places to meet new people. I’m doing something that I love to do. I wake up every day and want to go to work. That’s not a bad deal.

“As far as not liking it, I don’t like people trying to get into my private life and find out what I’m doing. People have changed. They want to know intimate details of your personal life, the National Enquirer and all those magazines.”

Those tabloids, they linked Woods with everyone except the mother of the Iowa septuplets.

He said wryly, “This year was the first time I’ve ever been engaged and dating at the same time.”

He knows why people want to know more. Galleries follow a guy who plays great golf, but they love a guy with a great personality.

Both sides of Tiger are developing, day by day. For example, here he is on what’s good and bad about being Tiger Woods:

“It’s bad because now more people are bringing cameras out, when they’re not supposed to.

“The good thing is, I love having big galleries because I’m not a good driver of the ball, and I hit them [spectators] and it stays in play.”

After today, Tiger’s golf year is done.

He has swung from La Costa to Augusta to Thailand to Scotland. It’s all downhill from here.

Perhaps a twister will blow through La Quinta this morning, and we will get to see Tiger Woods drive a par four . . . you know, as a perfect 1997 parting shot.

“If I had your game, I’d go for it,” O’Meara dared him, just for laughs. “Go with the driver.”

A hole in one on a par four?

Now, wouldn’t that be a wild way for the Year of the Tiger to end?