Tiger Woods' Sunday heater at the PGA was golf at its best

Golf is a slow sport. The time is mostly spent walking around a park, with the stroll interrupted by just a few swings each 15-minute hole. Watching others play golf, even the very best ever to do it, is full of dead moments and actionless minutes.

The payoff comes in those few seconds when the ball is in the air and headed somewhere in the general vicinity of the pin. It can be LeBron sizing up a chasedown block or Russell Westbrook hitting midcourt on a run-out. It can also be Brock Osweiler dropping back to throw downfield. When the ball is in the air during a four-hour round, those are the few seconds of action most filled with tension and anticipation.

When Tiger Woods is on a heater, and he was on Sunday at the PGA Championship, the tension and anticipation are at their highest. There’s nothing like it in golf, especially now that it comes after four back surgeries thought to have ended his career. The modern tracer technology has added to that anticipation. We can see a ball tracking, generally in the right or wrong direction. But we never know how good it is until it lands. So those few seconds after Tiger hits an approach shot into the air are as good as it gets, when you feel the things you’re supposed to feel watching sports.

Tiger’s approaches were all headed in the right direction on Sunday. The ball came off the club, the tracer lit up the screen, and you’d inch up waiting for the explosion of noise up around the green.

We were not exactly eased into this heater, either. The round started with a ball in the air from 147 yards to seven feet, from 106 yards to four feet, and from 154 yards to two feet on the first three holes. That two-foot measurement is actually deceiving. The ball dented Bellerive’s soft third green and left a mark maybe six inches from the cup as the crowd lost its mind.

Seeing the best drivers whale away with power off the tee can be staggering. The moments when putts are rolling can be filled with anticipation, too. They provide the resolution, whether or not another birdie or miracle par-save is put on the card. The putts are what provoke the fist pumps. Tiger fist pumps are great. We can never have enough of those.

But with Tiger, when he’s dialed-in, the approach shots are the entree. Tiger has said repeatedly that hitting the ball pin-high has been the hallmark of his career. It’s the one part of his game that has made him so shockingly competitive in a year that is now arguably the greatest comeback ever in golf. This week, only one player who made the cut had a higher strokes gained approach-the-green than Woods. No one had a higher mark on Sunday, when Tiger was +3.87 SG-approach.

Bellerive was a soft, water-logged golf course. This resulted in target golf. You throw it at the target and the ball sticks. It’s not the most creative style of golf and as far away from what we saw, and Tiger himself romanticized, at Carnoustie. But Tiger’s approaches, whether it was to a target to run-out on a firm links course or into a defenseless Bellerive, have been the most satisfying aspect of his game to watch.

The result of this approach work was a final round 64, the lowest final round of his career in a major. It matched the round of the day. His 66-64 weekend is the lowest final 36 hole stretch in PGA Championship history. The low score also came on a day when Tiger didn’t even really have it. He said he was hitting it all over the range, with the driver on down to sand wedge. He hit zero fairways on the front nine and somehow played it in 3-under.

What makes him arguably the greatest of all time is his ability to get the most out of a day when he does not have it. The last four years, when he wasn’t injured, were often so ugly because this ability left him. When it was bad or something was off, it snowballed and the scores were embarrassing. This week, he started the championship 3-over through his first two holes. It came after a narrative had set at the start of the week that he was out of gas and not fully healthy. He spent Monday in three ice baths and then started Thursday 3-over. But he got back to even-par in the first round when it looked like he’d eject early from the championship. As Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee said about the day, “I think [Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas] would have learned something from him ... The ability to self-correct in the middle of a round is beautiful.”

Three days later, Tiger finished solo second.

There’s been this nagging question about Tiger booting it away on the back nines of 72-hole tournaments. It came up at The Open, where he threw away three shots in two holes and then never really got back into it. That’s not what happened at the PGA, where Brooks Koepka was not letting anyone else win, including Tiger on a heater. Woods did not pull off the chasedown but it was not because of some back-nine failure. His round could have been a shot better, perhaps, but he came in with 32 on the back. He was still dropping the ball on top flagsticks and setting off early-aughts roars that we didn’t think we’d hear again.

One of those roars came on Sunday’s last great moment in the air at the 15th. His approach shot from 164 yards settled 11 inches from the cup. You know how the commentary on TV is often prone to hyperbole or forced metaphors to fill the time. The announcer compared this shot to the St. Louis arch. You see, that’s a local landmark and was a convenient one for the moment. Only this wasn’t forced or a moment of exaggeration. That’s just exactly how the tracer looked, especially from the reverse angle on the replay. It was beautiful.

It did not really matter what happened in the championship — whether he won or lost — after this shot. The day had become something special, independent of the outcome.

That wasn’t always the case with Tiger Woods’ career. It was purely about outcomes. Even in his most decrepit stages in 2014 and 2015, he’d defiantly (and laughably) remind us that he only showed up to tournaments to win.

It’s harder to win now. He’s playing against a talent pool that’s made golf as deep as ever, thanks to him. The generation he inspired to play now owns the game. He’s playing well enough to win and it will come if this keeps up. It won’t happen as often as it used to but that’s not a requisite for celebrating a Tiger performance. After four back surgeries and two years playing no golf, maybe this will be the impact of the sunset phase of his career. A win does not have to be the reward for watching him play competitive golf again. Koepka won. Tiger did not. But his approach shots into the air and the moments that followed on Sunday are why we’ll remember the 2018 PGA.

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