Tag Archives: U.S. Open

Tiger will be just fine, thank you very much

Tiger Woods didn’t win the PGA this past weekend. He’s still looking to win his 15th major golf tournament.

And strange as it seems, golf’s pundit class is giving him a bad time because he hasn’t won a major since 2008.

Get off it, already.

http://msn.foxsports.com/golf/story/pga-championship-tiger-woods-departs-a-major-empty-handed-again-081113

Even if Tiger Woods never wins another major championship, he’ll be able to look back on what has been an extraordinary golf career. He’s won 79 PGA events overall, second to Sam Snead’s 82 wins. He is stuck on 14 major wins, with Jack Nicklaus ahead of him with 18. The way I see it, being mentioned in the same sentence with Slammin’ Sammy and the Golden Bear puts Tiger in the middle of some pretty tall cotton.

I think he’ll win more majors. Whether he catches Jack is another matter. Still, it shouldn’t really matter when measuring the impact Tiger Woods has had on the game of golf.

All of this armchair handwringing reminds of what sports talkers used to say about auto racing legend Mario Andretti, who’s generally recognized as one of the greatest drivers in the history of his sport. But he won only a single Indianapolis 500 race, in 1969. He figured to win many Indy races when he arrived on the scene in 1965. He had bad luck at Indy.

Someone finally asked Mario to comment on one of his many failures to win a second Indy 500. His answer, which I only can paraphrase now, was classic. He said he doesn’t measure the success of his career by what he didn’t do at Indy. He prefers to look instead at the big picture: Daytona 500 victory in 1967, Formula One championship in 1978 … and a host of victories at tracks worldwide of all kinds and shapes racing open-wheeled cars, NASCAR stock cars, Formula One road course vehicles.

I believe the totality of Tiger Woods’s career, when it finally concludes, will measure up.