Grand Plan

The first thing you should know about the Grand Slam, modern golf division, is this: Nobody has ever won it. Not Ben Hogan, not Arnold Palmer, not Jack Nicklaus, not even Tiger Woods. Tiger's only halfway there now, but at better water-coolers everywhere people are talking like it's a done deal.

That's because when Woods took the first two steps toward the Grand Slam, at the Masters in April and the U.S. Open at soggy Bethpage last month, he made victory look easy, and no golfer has ever made winning look easy before, not since Bobby Jones, anyhow. In his press conferences Woods spouts the company line. He talks about the difficulty of the course, the competition, the sport they play. He's pretending to be a golf traditionalist. His record shows that what he is, in fact, is a golf radical.

Step 3 for Woods begins on July 18, at the British Open. The last guy to get this far was Nicklaus. In 1972 he won at Augusta and won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. The British Open, which rotates among eight or so courses, was at Muirfield in Scotland that year, just as it is this year.

Muirfield is a classic windblown links course, on the short side (at 7,034 yards), with fast, narrow fairways and rough that engulfs small caddies, to say nothing of balls. It is considered by Nicklaus and many other of the best players to be the fairest of the British links courses and therefore the one best-suited to American golfers, who don't expect silly things to happen to well-struck shots—and don't react well when they do.

In the weeks leading up to the '72 Open newspapers were filled with stories assessing Nicklaus's chances. The Sunday magazine of The New York Times ran a long feature written by Alistair Cooke that included a picture of Nicklaus sitting in a golf cart above the caption, "Toward the impossible dream." That's how the whole thing was viewed "back in the day," to borrow a phrase Tiger uses.

At William Hill, the chain of British betting parlors, the odds on Woods's winning the British Open are 11 to 8. You put eight pounds down on Woods, and the house gets the rest of the field—Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, defending champion David Duval and 150 others. If Woods wins, you get back a measly 19 pounds. The odds of Woods's winning the British Open and the PGA Championship in August at Hazeltine, outside Minneapolis, are 4 to 1, down from the 50-to-1 odds he was listed at before the Masters. If he wins both, it's the end of golf as we know it.

"What everyone thought was impossible, Tiger wants to prove is possible," says Nick Faldo, who won the British Open at Muirfield a decade ago. "He's ticked off he didn't get proper credit for winning the Grand Slam when he did."

In Woods's mind—and Faldo's—he has already won the Grand Slam. He won the U.S. Open in June 2000 at Pebble Beach, won the British Open a month later at St. Andrews, won the PGA Championship at Valhalla that August, then won the Masters the following April, in a new year and a new season. It was the most dominating stretch of golf ever played, but many observers couldn't bring themselves to drape the Grand Slam sash on Woods. They (we) cited a technicality, that the four wins have to be in the same calendar year, as if this stuff were codified somewhere. "Call it what you want, I had the four trophies on my mantel," Tiger says.

Woods was given an itty-bitty title all his own: the Tiger Slam. Evidently that phrase didn't satisfy him much, which is why we are where we are this year. The man, now 26, is ready. If you're not, you've got a little time to get your head out of the sand. The Internet is not a fad, and Tiger will win the Grand Slam. This year.

Woods has eight major titles. He's 10 behind Nicklaus, still the leader in the clubhouse, but only for a while. Faldo predicts that Woods will win at least 12 of the next 20 majors. Throughout his career Nicklaus has been the most gracious runner-up you could imagine. (He had plenty of practice, finishing second in a major 19 times.) He might be back in that role sooner than he could have possibly expected.