Eighteen.
It’s the number most associated with Tiger Woods.
The legend goes that as a boy, Woods pinned a newspaper cutout of Jack Nicklaus’ achievements on his bedroom wall and vowed one day not only to scale Mount Nicklaus but eclipse those 18 majors.
It is a compelling narrative; one that’s captivated us since he changed golf with that groundbreaking 1997 Masters victory and continues, even amid the murky uncertainty that is Tiger today, to keep everyone guessing.
Will he or won’t he break the record and, if he doesn’t, can he be considered GOAT?
But what if it’s not entirely a real storyline? What if the 39-year-old Tiger doesn’t have the same dreams he had as a 9-year-old? Or what if he has already achieved all he wanted to on the golf course?
Neither Hank Haney nor Steve Williams – both now estranged but once the closest of confidantes – recall Woods talking much about the Nicklaus record.
“Really, it’s only been in the past few years I’ve noticed that he’s started talking about it,” said Haney.
Further, according to Haney, Woods once told him he had long been satisfied with everything he’d done in his career.
And both Haney and Williams point to the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines – Woods’ 14th and, significantly, last major win – as meaning more to him than Jack’s record.
“In all the years I caddied for Tiger, I never heard him talk about one tournament more than the Open at Torrey Pines,” Williams told me while I was writing my book, "Unplayable: An Inside Account of Tiger’s Most Tumultuous Season." “From the day they announced that it was going to be the venue, he talked about it all the time … which was intriguing to me because when he had the chance to hold all four major championships at one time, so you had from the end of the PGA in August 2000 until Augusta next April, so you’ve got seven months, he never talked about it.
“But jeez, he never shut up about Torrey Pines. His absolute resolve to win that tournament was just incredible. And (during the tournament) he was hitting it ****ing awful, but he had it in his mind that he was going to win and nothing was going to stop him.
“I could caddie for the rest of my life and there will never be another tournament like that. That’ll be the biggest highlight for me, ever.”
After winning in a Monday playoff against Rocco Mediate, Woods rated it as his greatest achievement. He put it at the top of his list with the 1997 Masters second and the 15-shot U.S. Open romp at Pebble Beach in 2000 third.
Some of that was because he won on just one good leg, but mostly it was because of what Torrey Pines meant to him. I once asked Woods if he could play just one last round of golf who would make his dream foursome.
It wouldn’t be a foursome, he said, just a two ball. Just him and his Pop, Tiger and Earl, the way they used to be.
And they’d be at Torrey Pines.
The famous San Diego muni cut into the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean looms large in the Woods family lore.
“Torrey Pines is a very special place to me,” Woods once told me. “It’s a place my Pop took me to watch golf, and it’s a course that we later played often together. I think of my Pop every day, but I have very distinct memories here.”
I was there when he won that Open, and I won’t see the likes of it again. But I have never forgotten something Woods said when it was over, before he limped away with his third Open trophy.
“I really don’t feel like playing anymore,” he said.
He was probably referring to the pain he felt in his leg, but it seemed a strange choice of words.
Now I wonder if he was providing a clue.
Of course, Tiger Woods Inc. needs us to be invested in the chase for Jack’s record. But if he isn’t, why should we be?
Still, even when he talks about it, he’s not so convincing, even to his friends.
“I think a challenge here is motivation,” said Woods’ closest friend in golf, Notah Begay.
“Seventy-nine times he’s won [on the PGA Tour], 14 majors, he beat everybody, everywhere around the world, and it’s tough to find the motivation to just get up and go out and do it again.
“That’s, I think, why we’ve seen such a drop-off in winning performance from a lot of the greatest players when they go to the Champions Tour. They’re like, ‘I’ve been beating these guys my whole life, and now they’re ultra-motivated and I’m ready to retire.’
“I’m just not that into it.”
And if there’s something that I have thought about Tiger, ever since 2009, it is that he just doesn’t seem that into it.
Hunter Mahan, who has grown close to Woods, told Reuters last week that he doesn’t “see (Woods) enjoying the game as much as he used to.”
“It seems to be more of a chore to him now,” he said.
If he were so committed to chasing Jack’s record, would golf be a chore? Perhaps the answer is that as a grown man and as the father of two young children, life has other priorities.
Earl was a crackpot to many, but in truth he was far wiser than the golf cognoscenti thought him. Once, in a conversation he thought was off-the-record, he was asked how many majors Tiger would win.
He didn’t say 18.
Or even 19.
No, Earl Woods said … 14.
