Inside Tiger Woods’ misery at The Open: RIATH AL-SAMARRAI on why the golf legend is deluded and how he has become a ceremonial player in every mind but his own

‘At Pinehurst he didn’t seem to like any of the strokes and you think, “What the hell is he doing?” He comes to Troon and he won’t like it there either. There’s a time for all athletes to say goodbye but it’s very difficult to tell Tiger it’s time to go. He clearly still feels he can win. We’re more realistic.’ Colin Montgomerie, July 2024

I followed Tiger Woods for a few holes on Friday and it’s a curious kind of relationship he now shares with the game he redefined. Love, he would call it a few hours later, but it was hard to see what he meant by Troon’s links.

There were plenty of galleries, because that’s a given. We’d say the same of the other golfers. They idolized him, craved and clawed for his approval, and he made them all richer. And he still does.

But Woods’ love for golf? His golf? That’s different, of course. It’s a dance of bored acquaintances now, no matter what he tells us to our faces. His golf abuses him. It teases him. And he frowns back and demands too much, so they go round and round, bickering and sniping, this pair of strangers who were once so in love.

I saw it all on the inward nine of his second round and he had that sad feeling about him as he slowly walked up the bank to the 15th tee, 13 over par for the tournament at that point. He had that look we all know so well – eyes puffy and trained on the floor, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, exhausted, hollowed out by a few realities.

A minute earlier, he had missed a three-footer on 14, so he was in no mood for the outstretched hands of children. He just wanted to get the driver in his glove, and when he did, he stared out over the bumpy terrain of a nasty 500-yarder, then sliced ​​deep into the fescue on the right side. Woods sighed and started that damned walk all over again, shook his head, and stepped into that little blunder.

Love? Not there. Not at that moment. Drive it to the airport and let your agent do the rest.

But what does love actually look like for Tiger Woods? It’s a multi-layered question, that one, so we’ll stick with sports. Is it the fight for small wins? Is it the fear of the alternative, of breaking up and the silence that follows?

Or is it the fleeting satisfaction of knowing, as we all know, that one good swing can make this insane game feel better for a moment? Is that where he is now, 48 years old and approaching 70, and is that why he allowed himself, for the briefest of moments, a faint smile as he dug his second swing out of the abyss, up into the wind, and back down into the hills that rolled his ball to within 10 feet of the cup?

What a shot. What a roar. What magic and there is no magic in golf like Tiger magic. And how we all want to see them fix this.

But they won’t, and there’s only one man in the world who believes they can. And that’s the same man who went on to miss the birdie putt and walk down the 16th, passing the outstretched hands again on his way to missing another important cut by a mile. Love does indeed move in mysterious ways.

Of course, I was thinking about Colin Montgomerie during all this. That’s why I was there, three days after the jokes started going around, walking in Woods’s paw prints. There had been a murder in the media tent. An attack. When the vacuum cleaners started on Tuesday night, we had giggled that they were picking up bits of Monty.

Woods had given him a beating, just as he had at St. Andrews in 2005. That was a four-stroke advance toward his second of three Open titles; what happened Tuesday was a single bullet between the eyes.

Montgomerie spoke for almost everyone in the match in questioning why Woods would do this to himself, but at the same time he also committed the mortal sin.

‘Well, if a past [Open] ‘I’m a champion, I’m exempt until I’m 60,’ Woods had said when Montgomerie’s comments were raised. ‘Not Colin. He’s not a former champion, so he’s not exempt. So he doesn’t get the chance to make that decision. I do.’

With a little prodding, Woods had more to say: “When I get to his age, I still get to make that decision, whereas he doesn’t. I’ll play as long as I can play and I feel like I can still win the event.”

It was a great lyric. But it was also cruel, unnecessary and, in the context of the last nine words, delusional.

As in links golf, there were multiple routes to the hole to answer the question and he chose to belittle someone for revealing the biggest non-secret in the game. Montgomerie had spoken the truth and it goes without saying that more than one truth can be true at the same time.

When Woods steps onto a golf course these days, I don’t see a contender. But I do see courage. I see a stubborn spirit, and I see the soul of a champion whose body can no longer play. I see a man who has completed just 32 competitive rounds since that car crash in 2021 and has shot only three rounds in the 60s and 10 times in the 77s or worse, and yet he’s chasing a dream. I see a man who has missed cuts at the last three majors and who outran Augusta storms to survive the Masters weekend and, my goodness, it was incredible.

I mainly see a man who has no chance of winning another tournament, but I do see a lot of dignity in the way he keeps trying.

But I didn’t see much merit in what he said about Montgomerie, who was right in almost all of his comments. Woods is not realistic in his thinking that he can win and he doesn’t seem to relish the realization that he was mortal after all.

I hope Woods keeps up his delusions, because no one brings electricity to a windy field like he does. But it’s also worth noting that he didn’t get a championship exemption at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst last month. He got there by special invitation. They rewrote their rules for him.

For that is where he is today – he is a ceremonial golfer in all spirits other than his own. I will continue to enjoy those ceremonies as they happen, just as he will continue to grin until their end, finding an unusual kind of love in the suffering as he does so.

Good luck to him. But it would be a great shame if this last act of his career were to save his most accurate shots for killing those who dare to say the obvious.

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