You find all sorts of characters hanging out around the foot of the Open leaderboard. There’s Denwit Boriboonsub, a 20-year-old Thai who qualified by shooting 28 around the back nine of the Malaysian Open. Altin van der Merwe, a South African amateur who has just quit his day job as a waiter to concentrate on golf. Wyndham Clark, whose one and only top-30 finish in a major was the US Open he won last year. And the 58-year-old Todd Hamilton, who secured his single major right here at Royal Troon 20 years ago, and is still bowling up every summer to make the most of the exemption he earned doing it.
Oh, and there’s also some fellow by the name of Eldrick Woods, or “Tiger” to those who know him. Woods followed the 79 he made in the first round by scoring 77 in the second, which gave him a 36-hole total of 156. That put him 14 shots over par, well outside the projected cut line. It was the worst week he has ever had at an Open, and, but for the final putt from three-feet on the 18th, it would have been the worst 36-hole score he has ever recorded at a major championship. As it was, it equalled the 80-76 he shot at the US Open at Chambers Bay in 2015.
Woods has reached the point where he’s never going to play in the Open again without having to put up with speculation that it might be for the final time. People have been trying to retire him ever since he walked across the Swilcan Bridge during the second round at St Andrew’s in the 150th championship a couple of years back. After he had limped off the course at Troon he was asked, again, whether he would be in the field at Royal Portrush next year. “Yes,” Woods said without hesitating, “definitely”.
His opinion about the way he had played was similarly blunt. “It wasn’t very good,” he said. “I was fighting it pretty much all day. I never really hit it close enough to make birdies, and consequently I made a lot of bogeys.” Five altogether, plus a double at the par-four 2nd where he whistled a chip 10 yards past the pin and off the far side of the green.
It could have been worse. He caught a lucky break when he made a par at the 8th after his tee shot caught on a sprinkler head as it was rolling down the bank into the bunker on the right-hand side of the green.
Some of his best golf was in the way he scrambled himself out of the worst of it on two of the longer holes. At the 6th, he chopped his ball from the rough on the right side, then dumped it into the gallery on the left. He still managed to somehow get away with a birdie (his only one of the round) after he made a putt from 21ft. At the 16th he made a remarkable par with a putt from 13ft, even though he had landed his first shot into the burn, and walloped his third into the grandstand.
Trouble was they were about the only two putts he made from any sort of distance all day. Time was when you could find him on the course by listening for the roars. These days you can track him by the sighs and winces.
You wouldn’t necessarily have guessed it from watching him limp and grimace around the links, but Woods insisted he had a grand old time out there. “I loved it, I’ve always loved playing major championships. I just wish I was sharper physically. Obviously it tests you mentally, physically and emotionally, and I just wasn’t as sharp as I needed to be. I was hoping to find it somehow, but I just never did.”
Woods’s ambition this year was “to make sure I was able to play all the major championships”, which he managed to do, even if he did miss the cut in three of them and finished 60th in the other. He insists that he is improving despite it. “I have gotten better physically even though my results haven’t really shown it, so I just need to keep progressing like that, and eventually start playing more competitively, and start getting into the competitive flow again.” It’s not going to happen any time soon. He’s not planning to play competitively again until December.
Still, if he believes it, then it doesn’t much matter what anyone else thinks. Woods’s legacy is his to do what he likes with. Even aside from the fact that he’s exempt, Woods has long since earned the right to play on as long as he wants. The man made the sport what it is today, and quite why so many of the other people in it seem to be in such a rush to usher him into retirement is a bit of a mystery.
He is still one of the biggest draws in the field, and attracts a crowd five or six deep, even if it does feel like the only reason they’ve come is so they can say they caught a glimpse of what he used to be.
