Tiger Not Extinct Just Yet

Between the bolts of lightning, the air horns that sounded twice to chase the gallery from the course and send the players scurrying to the clubhouse, after two delays and four full days of the PGA Championship, one indisputable fact remains.

Tiger Woods isn’t out of it even when he should be out of it. He should be on a plane somewhere thinking about the next tournament. He should be adding his latest paycheck. He should be getting his shirts dry-cleaned.

But he’s not even done yet at Baltusrol Golf Club because a band of thunderstorms wrecked the last round of the tournament and he still has a chance.

How could this happen? It’s the Tiger rules.

As time lines go, this one runs all over the place.

Check it out: Woods is tied for 113th after shooting 75 in the first round, then barely makes the cut and is tied for 62nd after two rounds, then moves up to a tie for 20th with a third-round 66 and now he’s still hanging around, in a tie for fourth after finishing with a 68 Sunday.

That puts Tiger at two under for the tournament, a modest total, but after the events of an entirely wacky Sunday afternoon, he can’t even leave yet because the players who won’t finish their rounds until today kept backing up so much that Woods was still in the hunt.

At least he is, mathematically.

Incredibly, there are only three players ahead of him.

Phil Mickelson had trouble finding fairways and making putts and is four under par through 13 holes. Steve Elkington is three under through 15 holes and Thomas Bjorn is three under after 14 holes.

They’re still not done, but Woods was through long before the lightning bolts started visiting the landscape. He knew enough to hang around. After all, there was a free lunch, he said.

“You know, you don’t know what can happen out there,” Woods said.

If you know that you don’t know, then you really know something. The fact is, Woods keeps happening, even when he should not. We all know that by now.

For example, he made bogey on two of the first three holes, never finding the fairway. At the first hole, he drove into the right rough. At the second hole, he bounced his drive off a cart path. At the third hole, he knocked his drive off a tree.

He should have been down, he should have been out, but he was just getting started.

At the seventh, Woods chipped in to save par. At the eighth, he knocked it to a foot from the pin. He birdied the par-three 13th and was back to par for the tournament. With the leaders crashing all around him, Woods got to the two par-five holes that changed everything, the 650-yard 17th and the 554-yard 18th.

His two-iron second shot went to the back of the green at the 17th, he chipped to within a foot of the hole and made a birdie. One under par now, Woods drove into the right rough at the 18th, wound up and knocked the ball over the back of the green, but chipped to 12 feet and made the putt for another birdie.

That’s how you spell two under par.

And that’s why Tiger still isn’t out of it.

He isn’t out of it despite four rounds that included three penalty strokes and five three-putts. Remove those eight shots and he’s 10 under and a runaway winner.

But he doesn’t want to think like that.

“If I did that, playing golf would drive me crazy,” he said.

“Only thing you can do is take a learning experience from it, positives and negatives, and apply them to the future.

“Unfortunately, I did a few things wrong on the greens, as well as my starts this week, got off to poor starts every day and had to somehow fight back. I was able to do it.”

He has played four majors this year and he’s still not done. He won the Masters and the British Open, was second at the U.S. Open where he bogeyed the 16th and 17th holes on the last day, and now, well, what?

“I’ve had a wonderful four tournaments,” he said. “I won two, I was close in one, I don’t know about this one yet.”

It’s also true for Mickelson and Elkington and Bjorn and even Vijay Singh and Davis Love III, who are two under but still not through with their rounds.

Tiger is done with his, but he can’t leave yet. Maybe he’ll somehow squeeze into a playoff, if all the others stumble backward again.

He’s not out of it until he’s out of it. That’s something Woods knows he knows, and we should too.