ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 8, 1996 TAG: 9604090118
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN STREGE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
THE STANFORD SOPHOMORE has a penchant for Big Macs and a solid game off the tee, but he's not ready to rush onto the PGA Tour.
What Tiger Woods wants most from life depends on when he last ate. If a few hours have passed, what he wants most is a Big Mac, his raison d'etre, as they say in France, where he once eschewed French cuisine in lieu of Big Macs. He recently missed a flight home from school in pursuit of a Big Mac. He checked his luggage at the curb, repaired to an airport McDonald's, then went to secure a boarding pass, too late for a flight that had been oversold. C'est la vie.
This is the essence of Woods, who likes only his food fast, who otherwise is not in a hurry, even to get where he is going. His vision of the future is limited in scope to the nearest golden arches. He is rooted firmly in the present, even as the rest of the world attempts to persuade him that the future has arrived.
Has it? This is the question confronting Woods as he ventures to Augusta National for the second consecutive year to play in the Masters, which begins Thursday.
``He could contend,'' said his teacher, Butch Harmon, not one given to dispensing praise indiscriminately. ``I don't know if it's going to happen, but he's good enough. I expect him to play very well there.''
The notion that Woods, at 20, already is skilled enough to weigh in not as a novelty but as a threat at Augusta is why golf is salivating in anticipation of what he might accomplish if he no longer had Stanford homework with which to reckon. It explains why his parents' house in Cypress, Calif., is besieged with phone calls and faxes from agents who already have calculated the endorsement value from a signature line of Tiger Woods and irons.
Yet Woods, a sophomore economics major at Stanford, steadfastly insists that in September he will become a junior economics major, in defiance of conventional wisdom that predicts he will launch his professional career after attempting to win the U.S. Amateur for an unprecedented third consecutive year in August.
``I feel that when it's time, it's time,'' Woods said recently. ``Right now, it's not the time.'' Either way, you have to figure this precocious African-American golfer on the rise will don the green jacket some day.
The counterpoint is argued by his record. He has been the pre-eminent amateur in the world for two years. At 19, he made the cut in the Masters and the British Open, finishing in a tie for 41st and a tie for 68th, respectively. Moreover, in the ensuing months, incessant fine-tuning of his game effectively kept status quo at bay.
``He's so much better, No.1, physically, as a golfer,'' Harmon said. ``His golf swing is so much better, so much sounder. The ability to control the distance of his shots is a thousand times better. And I think he's more mature, more grown up. He's just a better golfer.''
Off the tee, Woods already was as long as a Stanford economics lecture. He led the Masters field in driving distance last year, averaging 311 yards. But as his swing improved and his 6-2 frame was buttressed by Big Macs and fries that pushed his weight to a career-high 155 pounds, he is longer yet. In recent months, he has broken five drivers, caving the club face on two of them and cracking the foam inserts on the others.
But there is more to the game than busting drives and drivers, and while the international stage in 1995 showcased his strengths, he saw only weaknesses, imperceptible to the untrained eye, but as imposing to him as his tee shots are to opponents.
``When I have my A game, I'd have to say I can make a run with them,'' he said. ``But I know that overall these guys would beat me more times than not. My game is not as good as it should be or could be. Or will be, I hope. I saw a lot of shots I didn't know how to hit. There's also the thinking. These guys are course strategists. With the way they set up courses on tour, you have to be strategically intelligent. My course management is good for the level I'm playing, but it's not tour caliber.''
The anchor from which he is in no hurry to disengage himself is the fact that he genuinely enjoys the college experience, be it the pursuit of knowledge or a date for the Saturday night kegger at the frat house.
The irony is that from the college experience, only golf has proved disenchanting at times, notably the NCAA scrutiny that has resulted in a pair of one-day suspensions for inadvertent, minor infractions. One of them was that Arnold Palmer bought him dinner. Given Arnie's reputation for frugality, this gesture ought to have made headlines for entirely other reasons. Instead, Woods was admonished and predictably angered, fueling speculation that the only pomp and circumstance in Woods' future will accompany the announcement that he is turning professional.
Woods was reared by parents who stressed to him that the only way to the first tee was through the classroom. Yet Earl and Kultida Woods, once inflexible on their requirement that Tiger leave college with a degree, have softened on their hard-line in recent months.
``You have to remember one thing,'' Kultida said. ``He is 20. He is a man. I can't tell him, `I don't want you to do that.' Whatever decision he's going to make, we'll talk about it and we'll listen, but the decision is his.''
Eventually, perhaps imminently, the euphoria of testing himself against Greg Norman and Nick Price will suffocate his zeal for trading punches with San Jose State and Cal, and if that should be the case, ``then he has to get out of there,'' said Brad Faxon, his friend and a PGA Tour player of note.
``I would know if it's time,'' Earl said. ``It goes back to the AJGA [American Junior Golf Association]. I knew the moment he had outgrown it. It was at Castle Rock, Colo. He was playing a tournament. He was lethargic and he was playing terrible and he really wasn't concerned about it. He was bored. He had outgrown the AJGA and he never played another event.''
Could lethargy similarly beset him at the collegiate level, provoked by a productive summer playing with professionals? ``It could, yeah,'' Earl said.
Phil Mickelson already has blazed this trail, leaving behind a case study. When Mickelson was 20, a junior at Arizona State and still an amateur, he won the Northern Telecom Open, an overwhelming inducement to leave school early. He chose instead to complete four years of school and he advises Woods to do the same.
``Playing college golf and having the opportunity to play in pro tournaments as an amateur is an incredible opportunity,'' he said. ``It allows you to see what playing the tour is like without having the expectations. If you make the cut, it's a plus. When you add the label of professional, a guy like Tiger not only will be expected to make the cut, he'll be expected to contend and to win.''
A father's arrogance, fed by a son who has consistently demonstrated that anything is possible, has moved Earl to conclude that Tiger too might win on the PGA Tour as an amateur, rewarding him with a two-year tour exemption. Earl wants Tiger to play in two lesser tour events at the end of the summer, the Milwaukee Open and the Canadian Open, ``to give him a chance to win one,'' Earl said.
Meanwhile, the expanding pile of cash available the moment he declares himself a professional, believed to be upward of $10 million, apparently is an insufficient inducement for Woods to drop out.
``It's hard for me to understand that kind of money,'' Woods said. ``I've never experienced money. I can't comprehend it. I'm just having a tough time paying off my phone bill and credit cards.''
Whether this represents posturing intended to quell speculation that might have a ring of truth, that he has not dismissed the idea of turning pro later this year, is unknown. Those privy to his thinking are airtight, leaking nothing so much as a hint.
``The only thing I can say about that is I think his golf game is ready,'' Harmon said. ``I wouldn't try to get in the middle of that at all. He never mentions it. That's a decision he has to make. But I think his game is ready for the tour level. He has all the tools.''
These tools were forged ostensibly for the work required of a champion at Augusta National. At the U.S. Amateur in Newport, R.I., last summer, Johnny Miller took note of Woods' abilities, matched them to Augusta National's nuances, then began to measure Woods for a green jacket, concluding that he might win a closetful of them, as many as five.
``My game suits that golf course,'' Woods said. ``I hit the ball very long and occasionally crooked. There I can get away with it.''
Augusta favors the long drive, but does not severely punish the errant drive. Its fairways are generous to the same degree that its greens stubbornly resist iron shots. A quality short game is imperative to winning there, and this too is part of Woods' repertoire. He gets up and down as systematically as he orders dinner.
Of course he has more imagination around the greens than he does at the drive-through window, where he orders by rote a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, his dearest friends and those most likely responsible in the event that the future has indeed arrived and Woods is not there to greet it.
LENGTH: Long : 151 linesby CNB