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The Promise Keeper
Posted: Tuesday February 15, 2000 06:18 PM
You know the coolest thing about Tiger Woods's streak? Nah, not the six straight wins, one of the top 10 feats in modern sports history. Not the way he almost made it seven, even after losing his swing somewhere among the hang gliders and moondoggies and nude beachers at Torrey Pines Golf Club outside San Diego. Not that during those seven tournaments he fricasseed 623 other golfers, tied one and lost to one. Not that he earned just cab fare less than $5 million over those seven weeks, or did enough ads to make people actually believe he drives a Buick, or that he went from 17th on the career PGA Tour money list to first. Not that during that stretch he passed Ralph Guldahl, Tommy Bolt, Ken Venturi, Tom Weiskopf, Fred Couples, David Duval, Paul Azinger, Mark O'Meara, Davis Love III, Phil Mickelson, Corey Pavin and Nick Price in career wins even though he still isn't old enough to rent a car in most places. Not that he beat the nastiest sticks from all over the world while tromping through 10 time zones and being herded daily through last-day-of-Saigon mobs, Watergate press conferences and lobbies full of get-a-life autograph hounds, including one at 5:50 one morning at the Torrey Pines Hilton. Not that he had done all this when no other Tour golfer had even won four in a row since the '50s. And not that after losing at Torrey Pines to Mickelson he wasn't relieved as any sane human would be, but was genuinely pissed at what he called "finishing second" to Byron Nelson's antiquated, not-even-comparable streak of 11 in 1945 against a whole lot of Jug McSpadens in Miami Four Balls. Not even that last Saturday night somebody actually asked, "Tiger, would you be surprised if one of these guys makes a run at you?" and Woods was trailing by six at the time. No, the coolest thing about the Tiger Woods streak was that when he was hotter than a six-dollar pistol, in a publicity boiler, he kept a promise he'd made to a junior high school buddy three months before and let him caddie in San Diego. Can you believe that? Woods benched his regular caddie, Steve Williams, in favor of a gangly, 24-year-old childhood friend, Bryon Bell, who was trying to earn a little money for med school. Wouldn't you have said, "Look, B, I'll catch you sometime when I'm not trying to climb Annapurna." Or, "Yo, B, can I front you the cash instead?" "If it were me in a situation this big?" said one longtime Tour caddie. "I wouldn't have let anybody but my regular guy within a mile of that bag." But as Tiger's mother, Tida, said on Saturday night, "My son has changed completely. He's all grown up now." It's true. He laughs more, glares less, looks you in the eye more, storms out less, breaks out in grins more, breaks shafts less, makes bogey more, triple bogey less and, maybe because of all that, has become the most thrilling athlete in the world. He's the kind of man who risked the streak in the madness of Pebble Beach two weeks ago to play with his best college buddy, Jerry Chang. He's the kind of man who would put Bell, a 10-handicap Pacific Bell planning engineer, on the hottest set of tools this side of Bob Vila's -- just to be true. Of course Woods did much of the caddying himself. He double-checked every yardage B gave him. B read fewer of Tiger's putts than the guy from The Des Moines Register. Sometimes B would throw some grass to check the wind, and Woods would reach down and throw some, too. No offense, of course. None taken. "I was a little worried about screwing up," said the bespectacled Bell, who's known Woods since the seventh grade and played No. 2 to him on Anaheim's Western High golf team, "but we've had a great time." Profitable, too. Figuring Woods's usual fat caddie fees, Bell made upward of $25,000, which is about half what he makes a year at Pac Bell. Med school, here we come. Nurse, which way does this break? Yeah, Tiger can make a driver scream in fluent titanium, or get balata up and down out of Sing Sing, or make 20-year vets turn Maalox-white and pull over at the sight of him in their rearview mirrors, but all that's the outdoor pool-shark stuff. What's cool now is what's inside.
Issue date: February 21, 2000
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