Woods keeps sanity among the madness

Ian Chadband13 April 2012

When it comes to the allure of the Augusta National and the Masters, any rational analysis is drowned by the senses - "I don't think there has ever been a place with so much natural beauty," as Phil Mickelson drooled here yesterday on behalf of everyone who treads its almost unreal emerald acres - and a similar phenomenon occurs when normally sober voices go ga-ga over Tiger Woods.

So put the two together, throw in the prospect of the most celebrated sportsman on the planet possessing all four major championships simultaneously come Sunday, and it is a guarantee of gentle lunacy taking over.

If you listen to some here, when the 65th Masters tees off tomorrow, this happy conjunction will deliver the biggest and most important golf tournament ever staged. The most hyped, at any rate.

It is easy to get sucked into all the mania. Augusta looks picture postcard perfect and every time Woods takes to its manicured fairways, his presence is so magnetic that the rest of the world's best golfers might as well be invisible. Down Washington Road, even before the azaleas are glimpsed, desperate disciples hold out cardboard signs begging for tickets. No problem; a $125 week-long badge is theirs on the black market apparently if they've got a spare $10,000.

It's just about the hottest ticket in American sports annals, not just because of Augusta's venerable and venerated hold on the US sporting psyche, but because, even more fervently than at St Andrews last year, so many want to be in on Woods's date with destiny. It feels like a privilege and only adds to the myth-making surrounding him.

Take the stuff which greeted his arrival here. One US golf magazine had a Harvard psychologist speculating that Woods was changing the world like the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, Francis Crick, did when determining the structure of DNA. The Augusta Chronicle gave us a fictional tribute a la Harry Potter, entitled 'Tiger Woods and the Driver of Fire'. It read: "Everywhere around him were the whispers 'See him - yes - that's Tiger'. Tiger was magical. Unlike most, he had dark skin and closely curled hair. But his parents brought him up telling him he was special."

How about the hand-writing expert who studied his signature and pronounced: "The way the 'i' connects to the 'g' in one fluid stroke shows that Tiger is highly intelligent, seeing connections in ways others cannot, and can quickly calculate a whole series of shots to their logical conclusion."

Good grief, spare us please. Even the weird website of homage, tiger-woodsisgod.com, appears positively sensible amid all this. Which just makes the sheer common sense of the man himself so admirable. When is a Grand Slam not a Grand Slam? "It's not something I'm really concerned about," he shrugged. Did he feel burdened? "Come Sunday night, win or lose, life is going to go on. The sun will come up on Monday," came the refreshing answer.

Only Woods, it seems, can keep the proper sense of perspective. When it was suggested that he was owed another green jacket just because he hadn't won here since his amazing breakthrough in 1997, he had to laugh at the ludicrous implication in the question. Fact: before his third round 68 last April, he had gone 10 rounds at Augusta without breaking 70.

He can guarantee nothing on these merciless greens. When asked if he'd bet on himself at prohibitive odds of 5-4, he just responded sensibly: "Well, I believe in myself."

On Monday, he was practising a pitch and run just off the ninth green. When it shot past the hole, a great communal groan rang through the huge galleries as if he had somehow let them down by not sinking it. This is the crazy level of expectation he has to shoulder, prompting Mickelson to admit he does not envy him.

"The life he leads is a very difficult one, he sacrifices a lot," said the world No 2. "I don't know if anybody else would be really capable of dealing with what he has to day in day out." He's right.

This is how Woods deals with it. By remembering all the time that "it's not life and death, it's fun. Take it as that." And not as some branch of molecular science. Win or lose, perhaps Tiger's greatest triumph is that, amid the Augusta madness, he can maintain both his serenity and sanity.

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