No Pain, No Gain

Tiger Woods has spoiled us. Five months ago he said his goals were to win the NCAA Championship and an unprecedented third straight U.S. Amateur, and he accomplished both. After turning pro, he said he aimed to win enough money in only seven tournaments to secure his PGA Tour card. At first we were dubious, but then he played with such power and poise that his plan seemed more modest than unreasonable. Now when he says he intends to win a Tour event, as he did last week on the eve of the Quad City Classic in Coal Valley, Ill., we take him at his word. So when Woods shot a second-round 64 that included six straight birdies to take the lead at Oakwood Country Club and held steady with a third-round 67, a good portion of the golf world, and almost all the other people who don't care about the game but are crazy about Tiger, believed the 20-year-old would take another giant step.

There were some valid statistical reasons to bank on Woods on Sunday, such as the eye-popping 312.5-yard driving average and the gaudy 68.5 stroke average from his first 10 rounds as a pro. But mostly that belief was based on empirical evidence. Woods has demonstrated a genius for getting the job done, closing the deal. "Let the legend grow"—the seductive mantra of his father, Earl Woods, who has never been surprised by his son's accomplishments—has become a subliminal battle cry for Tiger. But in Sunday's final round, the game answered back. Golf inflicts pain on those who play it, and there are no exceptions. Ben Crenshaw and Jack Nicklaus, whose early careers parallel Woods's, absorbed a Tour bagful of psychic harpoons early on, with Nicklaus's tough hide proving an indispensible part of his greatness. Woods might be made of similar stuff, but the definitive tests have yet to be conducted. Sunday's ordeal (he closed with a two-over-par 72 to finish tied for fifth at eight under, four strokes behind winner Ed Fiori) can be considered his first pop quiz.

On Sunday, Woods found himself in unknown territory. His young man's propensity for making the big number, plus an alarming inability to steady a jumpy putter, cost him a tournament he knows he could have won with even an average performance. As Woods licked his wounds, the legend went into remission. After starting the day with a 337-yard drive down the middle of the 1st fairway, Woods birdied the second hole, and as he stood on the 4th tee, he saw his name atop the leader board with a three-stroke lead over such unimposing pros as Jay Delsing, Phil Blackmar and Fiori, with whom he was paired. But playing for a fade off the tee on the 460-yard 4th, a hole that doglegs to the right, Woods rushed his downswing and hit a double cross he's likely to remember. His ball flew left over trees and into a pond. As Woods said later, "From there, the adventure began."

Woods had to take a penalty drop on a steep embankment in heavy rough that left him the option of chipping back to the fairway or trying to reach the green, some 200 yards away, by blasting an iron through an opening in the trees that was about the size of a doorway. He chose poorly, deciding to go for the green. Woods pushed his six-iron shot, and the ball caromed dead left off an oak limb, disappearing into the bright green algae of the hazard. Another penalty, a chip out, an approach and two putts later, Woods had completed a quadruple-bogey 8.

Trailing by a stroke and suddenly looking very young, Woods rallied to par the 5th and birdie the par-5 6th. But when it appeared that he might be summoning a comeback of U.S. Amateur proportions, Woods somehow four-jacked the relatively flat 7th green from the astonishing distance of eight feet. Woods pulled his birdie try four feet by, jabbed the comebacker the same distance in the other direction and barely grazed the left lip with his third putt. He finally sank a three-footer for double-bogey 6. Quad City, indeed.

The wreck was more shocking than the nine strokes Woods lost to par over the final five holes of the opening round at the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills, after he was tied for the lead. "I was shocked," said Earl Woods, finally admitting surprise. "I thought that reaction would be all over with after the U.S. Open. But that was a first round. This was a final round. It's a new, valuable lesson."

Playing through his disappointment, Woods dug deep for four more birdies that salvaged a tie for fifth, but a golden opportunity had slipped away. Woods was the only player among the top 18 finishers to shoot higher than 69 on Sunday. At crunch time he had been crunched by a field weakened by the Presidents Cup.

After signing his scorecard, Woods was embraced by his coach, Butch Harmon, and for a moment fought back tears. "The one thing he is going to learn from this is how hard it is to win a Tour event," says Harmon, who had to be taken to the hospital on Saturday after inadvertently swallowing a bee. "The way things were going, I don't think he thought it was too hard."

He knows now. Quad City was perhaps the first real setback in Woods's heretofore charmed career. If Woods wasn't convinced that pain is the rule rather than the exception on the PGA Tour, he had to look no further than the winner, Fiori, whose career has run aground on several occasions. Known as the Grip because of the extreme palm-down position of his left hand on the club, the 43-year-old Fiori is the anti-Tiger—a squat, bullnecked grinder and one of the shortest hitters on the Tour. He is playing this year on a medical extension for a rotator-cuff injury and before Quad City had earned far less than the $62,507 he needed to keep his card in 1997. He had already sent in his application for the next Q school and had told his wife and two children he would probably become a charter-boat captain near his home outside Houston if he didn't make it. Until now, Fiori hasn't been in the top 100 on the money list since 1989. His victory came 14 years and seven months after his last one, in the 1982 Bob Hope Desert Classic, the second-longest span between wins in the history of the Tour.

In 14 years Woods might look back fondly on the Quad City Classic. He did many things well. On a day in which he had two penalty strokes and a four-putt, he battled back with six birdies to finish with a respectable score. In righting himself when all hope of victory was lost, he did the professional thing, winning a nice check. He has four tournaments to avoid a trip to Q school, where the hurt can be permanent.