Before Tiger Woods stepped to the first tee on Thursday, I asked Steve Williams what he thought of the new Nike putter Woods had put in his bag.
“Ask me again in four hours,” the caddie said.
Three days later and the answer’s as obvious as the constipated look on the faces of Woods and Williams.
A few years ago I asked Peter Thomson, the urbane Aussie who won the British Open five times, whether he thought Woods was the best golfer he’d ever seen.
No, he said, nominating Sam Snead and Ben Hogan as superior players, but he did concede that Woods was “the best 20-foot putter who’s ever lived.”
The best 20-foot putter who’s ever lived took 35 of his 73 strokes on the greens Saturday; how much worse could the worst 20-foot putter who’s ever lived have been?
Woods limped to a second straight 1-over-par round that all but ended his dreams of becoming the first man to win three straight British Opens at the home of golf.
But while Friday’s 73 was courageous and commendable, shot in gale force winds, Saturday’s was a regression, back to the kind of hapless days that have plagued Woods too often this year.
Saturday is supposed to be moving day; at Pebble Beach last month, Woods used it to thrust himself into the U.S. Open conversation. But on the Old Course he spent moving day stuck in neutral, then went in reverse.
It was as if he’d morphed into Vijay Singh or Sergio Garcia or Adam Scott — good ball strikers but bad putters who have, ironically, all done better on the greens than Woods this week.
“I'm playing better than obviously my position,” Woods said. “I certainly have had a lot more putts on the greens than I ever have, and that's something that has basically kept me out of being in the final few groups.”
Woods had six good looks at birdie in the first eight holes Saturday, and barely missed them all. But miss them he did, so that when he got a bad bounce on the par-5 fifth, where he needed to take a penalty drop after finding a gorse bush, and when he hit a bad pitch on the eighth, both misfortunes leading to bogeys, he had no cushion.
Just like that he’d dropped back to 2 under par while the gritty South African Louis Oosthuizen was increasing his lead and Englishman Paul Casey was making the turn in 31.
Woods did make birdie on the ninth — but so did almost everyone else — and the short, par-4 12th, but then undid the good work by three-putting the 13th and 14th, killing any momentum he may have been building.
When Woods made a nice 20-footer for birdie on the 15th, Williams threw his arms to the skies and shook his head in disbelief that a putt finally fell; he more than anyone knows those are the putts on which 14 major championship wins were founded.
Woods isn’t oblivious to his failings. Earlier in the year it was inconsistent ball striking that kept him from higher finishes; now the damage is being done on the greens.
“Ironically enough now I'm driving it beautifully and I'm not making any putts,” he said. “It's just one of those things where you just have to be patient. I was grinding, I was as patient as I possibly could be today, and I was just trying to plod my way along and just didn't get anything going.”
Part of the problem, he acknowledged, is that he’s getting off to slow starts.
“I've just got to get off to a quick start,” he said. “Today I had a makeable putt at 1, had a horseshoe on 2, had a makeable putt at 3. If those go in, it's a whole different ballgame.
“That's what the guys are doing at the top of the board. They get off to quick starts. If you're able to do that here and get off to an early start, especially before you get to 5, you've got 5, 6 and 9 are playing pretty easy, so you can make something up.”
If there was a motif to his campaign at St. Andrews, it came when he drove the 18th green for the second straight day, then proceeded to three-putt for par from 40 feet.
That was the ultimate indication that this would be someone else’s day.
That someone else turned out to be Oosthuizen, who belied those who said he’d crumble in the cauldron that is the weekend at a major.
The diminutive South African — a man fellow players unkindly call Shrek, because of the gap between his front teeth — not only didn’t wilt, but he also grew stronger.
After three-putting the first green, the 27-year-old calmed himself and proceeded to make a number of key par saves before adding birdies at the seventh and ninth.
He got some luck when a snaking 50-footer fell in for birdie on the 16th, which seemed to embolden him to launch his tee shot on the treacherous Road Hole right over the hotel.
Oosthuizen’s punched approach scurried through the green to the 18th tee box, where Casey, who’d shoot 67 to leap into second place, backed away from his drive.
But Oosthuizen, who had made only one cut in his first six majors, kept his head and made up-and-down for par, displaying a deft touch with the putter from 100 feet. He then brought the crowd to its feet by driving the last green.
Unlike Woods, Oosthuizen walked away with birdie and a four-shot lead.
