Woods Treated Rudely by Old Acquaintance

Although the Olympic Club isn’t the ideal course for Tiger Woods, conventional wisdom was that they had reached some sort of accommodation for old time’s sake. Woods, after all, used to play here almost every Monday while attending Stanford.

But, as anyone with more than a passing knowledge of U.S. Open history knows, the Olympic Club doesn’t play favorites. It would just as soon let Jack Fleck win as Ben Hogan, Billy Casper as Arnold Palmer, Scott Simpson as Tom Watson and, apparently, Lee Janzen or even Lee Porter as Woods.

Last year, the question on the second day of the U.S. Open at Congressional Country Club was whether Woods could win the Grand Slam. The question here Friday was whether he could make the cut.

Chip Beck misses cuts. Not Tiger Woods.

Through his first 40 tournaments after turning professional two summers ago, he missed two cuts, none in a major. But if he ever made a wish for a weekend off, it almost came true here.

Even with a birdie on No. 17 guaranteeing he would survive to play again today, he shot a two-over-par 72 and is six over for the tournament, nine strokes behind leader Payne Stewart.

If we were discussing anyone other than Woods, that wouldn’t merit a headline.

The Olympic Club isn’t set up for players like Woods or John Daly, who hit the ball nearly a quarter of a mile off the tee and require some forgiveness if they stray from the fairways.

With its rough measuring five to six inches high, this course is not a benevolent one, no matter how much local knowledge a player like Woods possesses. Sean Penn had local knowledge of Madonna, and they still got divorced.

Also, the Tiger Woods of this year has not been the Tiger Woods of a year ago. By anyone else’s standards, he has been superb, winning one tournament, finishing among the top 10 six times and earning enough money, more than $1 million, to stand fourth on the PGA Tour. But it’s accurate to say that no one who knows enough about golf to tell Mark O’Meara from Mark McCumber expected Woods to win here.

No one expected him to be tied for 37th after two rounds either.

You could see it coming in the first round. When he won the Masters last year by 12 strokes, he didn’t three-putt once. He three-putted twice Thursday and four-putted once while shooting a four-over 74.

On Friday, he four-putted again. This one, on No. 6, resulted in a double bogey and left him 14 shots off the pace set at the time by Stewart. Before the end of the day, Woods took a couple of steps forward and Stewart took three steps backward, enabling Woods to make the cut.

Far from discouraged, Woods still has a plan for winning.

“If guys who are seven, six, five or four over can somehow shoot three under and put that out there in advance of the leaders, that could play a big part,” he said. “People who are seven over par have a chance.”

Tiger, it seems, is only slightly less dogged than Tigermania.

To paraphrase a former member of the Olympic Club, reports of Tigermania’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

An alleged backlash against Woods supposedly has been fueled by overexposure. It’s true that there are more books about him than Thomas Jefferson, two written by Woods’ father, Earl. In most bookstores, you can find only one written by J.D. Salinger.

One book in particular, John Feinstein’s “Tiger Woods: Master or Martyr,” detailed Woods’ double bogeys off the course, his snub of Bill Clinton and Rachel Robinson, his snub of the media after the first round of last year’s U.S. Open, his snub of fellow tour player Billy Andrade, who asked him to sign a golf ball for a charity auction.

Last week, Golfsmith Inc., released results of a nationwide poll indicating that three times as many golfers would rather play a round with Fred Couples than Woods.

“We assumed Tiger would win,” Golfsmith spokeswoman Maria Krinsky said Friday.

She added, however, that Woods is still the No. 1 force in the game.

“Couples finished first in the poll because most golfers are still baby boomers or older and they relate more to him,” she said.

“But if you look at the spikes in golf sales over the last year or so, they all go up after a Tiger win. Otherwise, it’s pretty steady. Our sales department receives about 8,000 phone calls a week. After Tiger wins, we average 12,000. He’s the one attracting new players.”

And spectators.

For anyone who wants to see Woods, the best advice remains to stay home and watch on television.

There were so many members of his gallery caught in a traffic jam at the fourth green Friday that most couldn’t make it to the fifth tee before the marshals closed the ropes. The stragglers had to wait for the threesome of Lickliter, Harrington and Twitty to hit approach shots into No. 4.

Finally released, they moved so slowly that they hadn’t reached the fifth fairway before the marshals corralled them again in an effort to force them to wait while Lickliter, Harrington and Twitty putted.

Some Woods fans, however, scooted under the ropes and ran to rejoin his gallery. The only marshal who could have stopped them is Dillon.

“What a thrill,” a woman shouted into her cellular phone while thanking a benefactor for providing her with a ticket. “I’ve seen Tiger twice.”

She was lucky. For many in the gallery, his presence at the Olympic Club was a rumor.

Upset about waiting in a long line to get into a restaurant once, Yogi Berra is purported to have said, “No wonder nobody eats here anymore. It’s too crowded.”

No wonder nobody follows Woods anymore.