As most of the world knows, Tiger Woods was back playing golf for money this weekend.
Sunday, I was at the airport waiting for my flight and found myself watching the finish of the Masters tournament with a bunch of other folks outside an airport bar. With about two hours to go in the tournament, the best players were playing the last nine holes in various groups. Tiger Woods was among them, and the cameras were focused on him rather heavily.
(I find golf on TV rather weird these days. They jump cut from shot to shot, Tiger swings on one hole and then Phil swings on a second and someone else putts on a third and then there’s a commercial, and there’s no context to any of this. TV is no better at showing the thinking and strategic parts of the game than it is with baseball.)
Anyway, Woods was not hitting his driver very well, even by his standards. Tiger Woods isn’t terribly accurate with his driver, the big club, but he’s extremely creative about getting out of the trouble he gets himself into. But that’s a story for another day.
So Woods winds up and smashes a ball off the tee… deep into the piney woods. Woods in the woods, I guess. I don’t know whether he hit any of the spectators or had to have his caddie search for his ball; TV was off showing some other random shots. But when they finally get back to him, they’ve managed to get the camera behind his ball looking toward the green. It’s obvious he has an impossible shot through the trees; you can see a little bit of daylight through an opening perhaps 15 feet above the ground, but his chances of hitting it through there are small — even as good as he is at what’s called scrambling, or getting out of trouble.
At this point, he’s trailing the leaders by a few shots. And he has two choices:
- Try and punch the ball through the opening in the trees — possible, certainly, but likely to have bad results if he fails.
- Knock the ball out onto the fairway, basically at right angles to the direction he really needs to go — but a safe shot for a competent golfer, which he certainly is.
Only if he gets the ball through the opening in the trees can he win the tournament. Doing so doesn’t put him in the lead — he still has a lot of work to do — but he almost surely cannot win if he takes the safe route, which will cost him a stroke.
Now keep in mind that everyone who finishes in the top ten of a tournament like this makes a lot of money. The winner takes the biggest piece, but most people could live quite well for a year on what, say, the fifth-place finisher receives. And Woods was staring at the difference between, say, eighth and second-with-a-possibility-of-first:
- Hits through the trees successfully, has a good shot at second or even first if he plays the remaining few holes well.
- Safely pitches the ball sideways back onto the fairway, probably ends up fourth — where in fact he did finish.
- Tries to hit it through the trees and fails. Best case, he gets a good bounce off a tree and winds up in the fairway pretty much the same as if he’d pitched it out to begin with, finishing fourth. Or it could bounce back toward him and give him a repeat of this situation, except now it’s cost him a stroke to get there; maybe he finishes sixth. Or, worst case, it could bounce off a tree the wrong way and go out of bounds or be unplayable, costing him three strokes (the one he took plus a penalty plus having to play again from a bad lie) and he’s eighth.
Which would you choose?
You’re a leader in a tough situation. You can take a big risk and — if everything comes out right — make a huge score, but create a mess if things don’t go well. Or you can play it safe, assuring a comfortable profit but not a dramatic victory.
Woods, of course, went for it. And missed, though he got a good break when his errant ball smacked a tree at exactly the right angle and bounced out onto the fairway. But that’s the Tiger in him — nothing matters except victory.
But was it the right choice? The best choice? Would you have done it?
As it happens, eventual winner Phil Mickelson found himself facing a slightly easier version of the same type of shot a few minutes later, deep in the pines after an errant drive, but with a somewhat bigger window in the branches to hit through. He went for it and wound up about six feet from the hole with a terrific shot. On the other hand, former champion and still-among-the-leaders Fred Couples took one of these dangerous shots trying to get into the lead and put it in the water; it doesn’t always work out.
Three leaders, three very difficult risk/reward shots, all went for it. One nailed it, one missed but got a lucky break, and one fell short (literally, as Couples’ shot hit just short of the green and rolled back into the water).
That’s the way it goes. None of them took the safe route. It cost Couples and Woods money, made Mickelson a winner.
You’re the boss. You’re facing a tough shot, high risk, high reward. What do you do?
Is this the right time to be a Tiger?
