Woods and the author won big at '96 Vegas Invitational

	Glitzy Las Vegas played host to Tiger Woods' first triumph on the PGA Tour in 1996. AP
	Best Game I've Ever Seen RELATED: Click here to read all the essays REACT: What's the best game you've ever seen?

By George Dohrmann

Editor's note: We asked SI.com writers to share their memories from the best game they've ever seen. Here are their stories:

In the fall of 1996, I was a 23-year-old desk assistant in the sports department of the Los Angeles Times. It was a part-time position and as unglamorous a job as you can have in journalism. I made copies. I ran photos. I sometimes fetched dinner for the copy desk.

Prior to taking that job, I fancied myself a writer. But in the 18 months since I'd graduated from Notre Dame, I'd done very little actual writing. My contribution to what was then one of the best sports sections in America was the nightly "fish count" phoned in by boat landing operators reporting the number of fish their customers had caught that day. I readied the list for its slot on the agate pages.

It was depressing work, made even more so because the veteran desk assistants acted as if I had joined them in a vortex, forever doomed to a life of telling the world how many rockfish and ling cod were caught by Captain Hook's Sportfishing in Oxnard.

I thought about quitting a lot.

On the afternoon of Oct. 6, Dave Morgan, then an assistant editor at the newspaper, called me over to his desk. He had a problem. His golf writer was away covering an event, and Tiger Woods, a Southern California native and PGA Tour rookie, was climbing the leader board at the Las Vegas Invitational. Dave seemed perturbed, and I had no doubt he had tried and failed to get several writers on the phone late on a Saturday. So it was with great resignation that he told his desk assistant, "Look, if Tiger is within five strokes of the lead at the end of today, call travel and get a ticket to Vegas."

I worked the rest of the night with one eye on the golf results coming across the Associated Press wire. At about 6 p.m., I called travel services for the first time in my career. I didn't have an account (or even a company credit card), and there were logistical problems, but the night ended with me on a redeye flight to Las Vegas.

I had never covered a high school golf tournament let alone a PGA event, and as a cab dropped me off at the Tournament Players Club at Summerlin, I was afraid to go inside. The chief of the copy desk that Sunday, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, knew better than anyone how green I was. When I called from Vegas before the final round to ask about the length of my story, he asked who I was sitting next to in the press room. "Len Shapiro from the Washington Post," I responded. "Follow him around and do what he does," Emilio ordered. "Oh, and if Tiger wins, ask him if he'll give you his second best lede."

I followed Len around all day, even eavesdropping when he interviewed Butch Harmon when I had no idea who Butch Harmon was. I won't embarrass myself by reprinting the lede to the story I filed that night, but I was immensely proud of it at the time. It was my first big story. It went out over the L.A. Times news service and was picked up by papers all over the country. College friends called me from faraway cities and said they'd seen my story in their papers. For weeks after, I beamed, even when I was shackled again to the night assistant's desk, typing in how many calico bass had been caught at Dana Wharf.

I don't remember a single shot Tiger hit that day or any of the putts he made. My story says he beat Davis Love III on the first hole of a playoff, but I don't remember that, either. I do remember, however, how I felt on the flight home. Sitting in the last row, in an aisle seat, I felt like a real professional, someone with a career.

The greatest games are great because of their context in your life. Tiger Words has had bigger victories, but to me, his first win was his greatest. It authenticated him -- and me.

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