Chasing birdies

In the end Tiger Woods found a way to maintain his stranglehold on golfing headlines as 2009 drew to a close.

But for the Tiger’s peccadilloes (pecker-dilloes?!) the tale of the last year of the ‘noughties’ would have been a quite different one involving a surprising quartet of Major winners and arguably the most astonishing feat in the history of the Royal and Ancient game – if not all sport.

Tom Watson, for me, was the story of the year as he turned back the clock in the British Open at Turnberry.

It ended in heartbreak as a bad bounce on the 72nd green cost him the chance to take the championship outright before losing to Stewart Cink in the four-hole playoff but for a man just a few days short of his 60th birthday to have got that close defied all logic.

I must confess to having to dab away a tear or two when Watson’s putt for glory missed and his age finally showed in the playoff but when the disappointment lifted it was to reveal the multiple Major winner’s real triumph.

Unlike Woods, whose spitting, cussing and club chucking too often blotted his status as the world’s No 1 player, Watson conducted himself “in the manner in which the game of golf should be played.”

Even though he must have been bleeding inside he remained courteous and gentlemanly to a fault and ensured that Cink received due recognition for the greatest moment of his life.

It was a victory for the spirit of the game that set an example for all – in other sports too.

Had it not been for Tom Watson discussion might well have been whether a watershed moment had not turned up in the career of Woods.

It came on the final day of the US PGA at Hazeltine when Korean YE Yang went head-to-head with The Chosen One and beat him to become the first male Asian golfer to claim a Major championship.

Yang was ranked 110th in the world and he was up against a man who had won all 14 his Majors while holding the lead, or a share of the lead, going into the last round and who had never been beaten on US soil when leading by more than a shot.

Yang however refused to back down and produced some spectacular shots – a pitch-in for an eagle two and a sweetly-struck hybrid to the final green – to knot the tale of the Tiger and had Woods not been caught a’prowlin at year end discussion might have been about whether a chink had been found in his previously impenetrable armour.

So Woods claimed the headlines for all the wrong reasons but how ironic that the final word, belatedly and unintentionally, should belong to YE Yang. Interviewed, via an interpreter, after the PGA he was asked how come he had not been intimidated by Tiger.

His reply? "It's not like you're in an octagon where you're fighting against Tiger and he's going to bite you, or swing at you with his 9-iron!"

The other two Majors also produced story lines that flouted sport’s propensity to create fairytales.

At the Masters Angel Cabrera snatched the Green Jacket from sentimental favourite Kenny Perry (who would have become the oldest Masters champion) and at Bethpage Black the romantic outcome should either have been Phil Mickelson finally adding the big silver trophy to his collection of runners-up medals or David Duval coming back from the dead but the championship went to, um?, Lucas Glover.

Next year there should be a return to the natural order of things – although can you imagine the media scrum when Tiger slinks back out of the jungle! – with the Majors due to be played at Augusta (obviously), Pebble Beach and St Andrews with the PGA at Whistling Straights, the original Pete Dye course on the shores of Lake Michigan where Vijay Singh won the PGA in 2004.

And that’s it for another year. May your drives go far and sure, your irons straight and true and your putts drop more times that not… and may you always find yourself in fourballs that play in the way Tom Watson does.