MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES24 1GS Saturday April 9 2022 | the timesSport Comment
“I realised, as Tom did, that’s it, I can’t
win any more.” But it took him until
he was 74, and also 17 missed cuts in
19, to reach this conclusion.
Here in Augusta on Thursday, Lyle
finished with a ten-over-par 82 and
he talked afterwards about his “pride”
and that there is “not quite so much
enjoyment when you get your arse
kicked when you shoot 82”.
So why, then, are you doing it? How
can former champions put themselves
through the process of getting their
arses kicked? His answer follows suit:
“I am not good enough to win the
tournament unless something
happens and I start making putts and
chip-ins and I get one of those days
when you shoot 65 or something.”
You see, after 11 missed cuts in his
past 13 appearances, he too still has in
his mind just the inkling that the
lightning could still strike.
Woods said two things: that he
won’t play when he can’t win. And
that he will know when that is.
Pretty much every former
champion, it seems, persuades
themselves that they are the same.
They won’t cut a deal, they insist they
are there to compete, they will
continue to rage against that dying of
the light. In golf, it’s just harder to
recognise when the light has gone.
There are many who believe that
the Masters is just too folksy, that it
should put the older guard out of
their misery and make the decision
for them. It’s hard not to agree.
Woods, meanwhile, says that this
debate will not touch him. He will
know when he can’t win and he will
be gone. As with so much of what he
does, he probably sees this more
clearly than almost anyone else.
Can you imagine an aged Tiger
missing 17 cuts and still coming back?
Impossible.It’s hard to
know when
the light has
finally gone
Owen Slot
Chief Sports Writer
I
t was with his typical studied
intelligence that Bernhard
Langer told The Times, in an
interview this time last year, that
he was “absolutely” convinced
that we would soon see one of the four
major championships won by a golfer
in his fifties. The old soothsayer was,
of course, spot on because it was only
a month later that the 50-year-old
Phil Mickelson fulfilled his prophecy.
Gary Player, a man with infinite
belief in the possibilities of human
achievement, extended Langer’s
wisdom considerably further this
week when he told The Times that he
was pretty sure that mankind would
soon push it out by another decade
with a major victor in his sixties. This
may have seemed a bit far-fetched
had it not been for the fact that sitting
alongside him was Tom Watson, who
has won eight majors and, at the age
of 59, was one eight-foot putt away
from making it nine.
There were 26 years between
Watson’s last major victory and that
infamous missed putt at Turnberry in- If ever there were proof that
golfing genius can be lost and yet be
forever within your grasp, Watson is
the evidence. Indeed,
which golfer hasn’t
wrapped their
hands around a
club with the
thought “I’m back”
cruelly deceiving
them? And,
further to
that, how
are you to
know when
you have
arrived at
that point,
when
actually you
will never be
back again?
For much of
the start of this
week, we were
wondering
whether that
was where
Tiger Woods
had got to.
Woods said:
“No, I’m fine,
and I’m
coming back to
win again,” and
then on
Thursday did a
decent job of
Murray still believes he can beat the world’s best, while Woods, below, says he will only play if there is a chance of winningproving himself right.
Intriguingly, for a man who
understands his game so well, he had
also said this: “If I feel like I can still
win, I’m going to play. But if I feel like
I can’t, then you won’t see me out
here.
“I don’t show up to an event unless
I think I can win it. There will be a
day when it won’t happen, and I’ll
know when that is.”
He is telling us something here: he
is only prepared to play if he can win,
which is a loaded statement because
there are former champions aplenty
who keep accepting their invitation to
“compete” in the Masters when
winning is clearly beyond them.
Player was still playing at the age of- This week, we have had Freddie
Couples playing at 62, Larry Mize at
63, Langer and Sandy Lyle at 64. Lyle
hasn’t made the cut since 2014; Mize
missed the cut last year when his two
rounds left him at 19 over par.
These are all sportsmen who grew
up with their eyes unswervingly fixed
on victory and nothing but. You don’t
become a major champion unless that
is uncompromisingly your mentality.
At what point did that slip? At what
point did they come to terms with the
fact that the psychology had changed,
that they weren’t going to win the
Masters and that, actually, they were
OK with that? Because that is a big
concession.
Some athletes, such as Woods,
simply won’t
be OK with
that. They will
stop. Nick Faldo
never played
another Masters
after the age of 48.
In tennis, it may
appear that Andy
Murray is raging
against the dying of
the light, but he insists
that he can still beat the
world’s best, that he can
still win a major title.
Conversely, those close
to Roger Federer
believe that he may be
more accommodating and
that if his body does allow
him a comeback at the age
of 40, he may regard it as a
farewell tour and therein a
departure from that point
where victory was his prime
driving force. If true, that is a
big departure.
There is a difference, of
course, between golf and almost every
other sport, such as tennis, where
your opposition can use their strength
— age-related, of course — to
dominate you physically. When
Langer suggested that a 50-year-old
would win a major, he said that it
wasn’t actually physical strength, or
ball-striking distance, that starts to
erode performance through the
decades, but your eyes.
“It sounds simple but your eyes are
important for reading putts and
working out distance,” he said.
But what if you are still seeing it
well? Jack Nicklaus won his fifth
Green Jacket aged 35. In 1986, 11 years
later, he got what he called “the
lightning in a bottle” and won his
sixth.
He never made peace with the idea
he might not win. “I still felt like I
might find another lightning in the
bottle,” is his way of putting it, “and I
almost found it again at age 58.” That
was in 1998, when he found himself
contending again on the last day.
“I remember standing in the 15th
fairway,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, if I
finish the same way as I did in ’86, I’m
going to win.’ I still had the attitude at
58 that I could win.” Six years later,
when he knew he couldn’t, he was
done.
That is golf: it allows you to
persuade yourself that you still may
find that lightning in the bottle. When
did Watson finally quit the Masters?
“When you can’t compete, there’s no
sense on being on the golf course,” he
said. “It was pretty easy for me to say
no más.”
It can’t have been that
straightforward a decision, though,
because he missed 17 of his last 19
cuts at Augusta.
Player seems to have pushed this
even further because he will tell you:Literally, the biggest name in Augusta is
not actually that of Tiger Woods, but of
Greg Oldham, “Augusta’s #1 Agent”,
whose gargantuan face smiles down
from the vast advertising hoarding that
rises above the car parks and the
Washington Road.
You turn out of the gates of the
Augusta National on to the long strip of
mainly low-rent fast-food drive-ins and
burger joints and it is heaving with
these elevated advertising hoardings,
many of them offering to fix your roof
or your divorce, all the way to the far
end and the outlet of the fast-food
chain Wife Saver.
Hooters is still there and still, it
seems, the most popular bar on the
strip, heaving with twentysomething
blokes with reversed baseball caps and
a beer bottle in hand. Maybe that is
because John Daly is still here too, as
he has been for decades, still flogging
merch. “John F***ing Daly” head covers
are going for $40.
Maybe it is reassuring that after two
years of the pandemic, the Washington
Road has survived largely unchanged,
though the Top Dawg Tavern has
replaced Tin Lizzy’s Cantina (which
itself replaced Road Runner Cafe, which
itself replaced Flyin’ Cowboy and,
before that, Dave’s Barbeque).
Indeed, Oldham reports not only that
he used to be a six-handicapper, but
that the city is thriving. He himself did
$97 million of real-estate business last
year. Plus Augusta has the largest burns
centre in the south east and is one of
the cybersecurity capitals of the world.
Inside the Augusta National gates is a
beautiful, bewitching Disneyland. Life
outside is nothing like it. Not remotely.Head for the exit
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