What it's like to follow a Tiger Woods practice round on an empty course
Tiger Woods teed it up early on Wednesday with Jason Dufner. They pitched and putted their way around Whistling Straits as Lake Michigan soothed souls in the background. It was fantastic.
By
Kyle Porter
•
5 min read
HAVEN, Wisconsin -- I arrived at Whistling Straits really early on Wednesday morning with a plan to file several stories and enjoy the rest of the day. When I stepped off the shuttle, I realized I'd left my media badge at the media hotel 75 minutes away in Milwaukee.
The reason I'm telling you this is because getting a new badge was a long string of events that eventually led to me sitting down, pissed off, alone in the media tent here at the PGA Championship. No longer did I feel like filing my stories.
I looked up.
"T. Woods, J. Dufner (hole No. 10, 6:53 a.m.)" the screen read.
That sounded like a lot more fun.
I caught up with T. Woods and J. Dufner on the 10th green as they putted to tees Tiger's caddie Joe LaCava had put in the ground representing all the variations of pin placements on the 10th hole for the week.
Tiger Woods is not somebody I often follow on the golf course. His legions of fans make traipsing after the Big Cat an endeavor without an adequate payoff (especially these days). It's the same reason Woods once said the following to Y.E. Yang's caddie.
"You see why I don't play much?"
But Woods playing a practice round as the sun rises over mighty Lake Michigan on an empty course with a smattering of 15 humans any way you look (half of them PGA Championship volunteers) is a different thing altogether.
When we think of our legends, we rarely imagine them in blank spaces like this. That's why it was such a bizarre thing to follow Tiger without anybody else around. I felt vulnerable, as if the absence of people would cause me to be sucked into his gravitational pull.
I somehow avoided it, though, and waited for him at the 11th tee. Up close, Woods' body looks lithe, but his face was tattered. The result of so many PGAs gone by and the realization of how many more there are to come. The physical manifestation of the mountain he has yet to climb.
He seems eternally tired. Even as he hit putts to the tees LaCava set up for him, he didn't seem fully into it. The movements of a man who knows what the days before winning a tournament feel like but doesn't necessarily care about experiencing them anymore. Who can blame him?
Woods stuck his peg in the ground on the 11th tee and looked at LaCava. "Just right of that bunker?" he pointed and asked. "Yeah, that one bunker out there, you got it," Dufner joked as we all stared at what looked like 73 of them lining the fairway.
LaCava joined Woods for a debriefing before emerging with a peppy, "Yeah, that's money." Woods murdered his drive at the 563-yard par 5 and it faded in front of 20 of the 73 bunkers setting up a shot at the green in two.
He walked over to one of the other 15 people watching -- a kid about nine years of age -- and signed his hat. Woods walked off with the kid's Sharpie. Nobody said anything. A few paces away, he turned around to the kid and said, really inquired, "good hands?" as he tossed the pen back. It could have been a flaming baton and the kid would have caught it.
Woods marched down the fairway with Chris Como who laughs at things Woods says at a decibel level that reminds you they haven't been together for a full year yet.
Another kid, who probably ran all the way from the front gate as folks started trickling in, ran past me in shorts stitched with $100 bills with a Whistling Straits flag waiting to be signed. This is why I don't follow Tiger.
Woods easily reached the green with a 3-wood that looked like it had been transported from the early 2000s. "Want some?" he asked Dufner as he coated himself in bug spray for those pesky mosquitos he openly railed against on Tuesday.
"We've seen people show up very early times, because I kind of like to play early," said Woods. "On top of that, I've never seen mosquitos like this, like they've had here. I live in Florida and we go out in the evenings and you may get eaten, but here you get eaten alive."
He's not wrong.
Woods walked a bit with USA Today reporter Steve DiMeglio to the 12th tee, a par 3. One of the pin placements is back right in an area that seems like it floats over the ocean. The pin wasn't there on Wednesday, but Woods was looking at it anyway.
"That far to the right?" he asked. Yep.
"F--- me," he responded before dropping a ball perfectly in the dead center of where he was aiming.
Dufner took a different route and ended up in grass as tall as Rory McIlroy in front of the green. "Have fun with that one," Woods smiled at him as Dufner hit another ball.
The caddies of Jordan Spieth and Hunter Mahan joined the group at this point and the growing group walked up another hole. I stuck around long enough to hear a patron say "it's the PGA Championship, I'm going to have a beer" at one of the concession stands. It was 7:33 a.m.
The gallery swelled to three deep at the next tee box and I'd had enough. I peeled off and walked away from the masses, thinking about what I'd just witnessed. So many thousands of people are here this week to watch the 278th-ranked golfer in the world. I just got to see him on an almost completely uninhabited golf course with as stunning a backdrop as American golf offers.
Before I wheeled and left, I took one last look at a legend. There was Tiger Woods with Chris Como, marching up to another second shot like he's done tens of thousands of times. There was Tiger Woods, hitting perfect shots on a chilled morning with Lake Michigan rumbling just beyond him. There was Tiger Woods looking both young and old as the sun unfurled on another day in the golf word.
There was Tiger Woods.
