Slaying the Tiger Read online

  Once again, we had misjudged him. He gathered himself from holes 5 to 7, and then went on a rampage, making birdies on three of the next four holes to surge to a 1-up lead. On the par-3 16, 1-down and thirty-two feet away off the tee, Els banged home a birdie putt to square the match yet again. After a half on 17, Dubuisson was rock solid again on 18, and Els blinked first. The lumbering South African missed his par putt and conceded Dubuisson’s short effort, ending the match.

  As the cameras converged on Dubuisson, he spoke so quietly that everyone in the press room leaned in to hear. He didn’t sleep well the night before, he said. As he stood in the cluster, his clothes bedecked with odd, unheard-of sponsors—J. Lindeberg (clothing), Audemars Piguet (luxury watches), Robertet (a “fragrance and flavor house”), and something called Exelia, the purpose or origins of which I refuse to spend any more time attempting to uncover—he seemed to retreat without moving an inch.

  The semifinals and finals are each played on the final Sunday, which meant Dubuisson and Day were sent right back out in the cool afternoon to decide the champion. Again, Day was red-hot at the start. He established another 3-up lead, and made spectacular birdies at 11 and 15 to arrive at 17 2-up with just two holes to play. Needing two wins to force extra holes as the sun began to set in Tucson, the unsinkable Dubuisson delivered. He birdied 17 and made a par on 18 that Day failed to match. In a tournament full of high drama, there was no way the final match could have ended in anything but sudden death. On they went, into the fading light.

  The win had been tantalizingly close for Day, and he felt that familiar urge beckoning—enough is enough. Back down. The discomfort of being in the lead had haunted him at the end of the first eighteen holes, and now he had to shake himself loose. He managed to steel his resolve and submerge the negative thoughts, and on the first playoff hole it looked like he had the tournament won when Dubuisson nuked his seven-iron approach over the green.

  The ball came to rest at the base of a jumping cholla, stuck among the needles, covered by sharp branches and seemingly inaccessible. The lie was miserable—smart money said that any attempt would result in five to seven branches of prickly cholla embedded in his upper body, and zero balls on the green. The Frenchman had run out of options, though, and knew he had to try. Without much prepararation, he took a sudden swing and smashed a branch off the cholla, hitting a television cable in his follow-through. Miraculously, the ball jumped off the desert floor, bounced onto the green, and rolled to within five feet.

  Jim Nantz, on CBS, hadn’t even finished speculating about whether he might take an unplayable lie. He interrupted himself as he watched the result: “Oh my goodness!”

  “That’s it, I’ve seen it all,” said David Feherty. “I mean, if Arnold Palmer rode by on a scooter…”

  To Day’s disbelief, Dubuisson had set himself up for par. He made the putt, and the match continued. If that great escape felt karmically unjust, imagine Day’s state of mind when it happened again on the very next hole. This time, Dubuisson’s approach nestled beneath a yellow-flowered brittlebush. Again, the lie looked totally unplayable. And again, Dubuisson took an awkward sideways stance and smashed his club at the plant. The ball shot out over the hard desert floor, cleared the corner of the black stadium risers, and landed with perfect speed just off the putting surface. Somehow, against the laws of physics and logic, it rolled onto the green and settled about eight feet from the hole.

  “This is absolutely bizarre,” said Nantz.

  “I give up,” offered Feherty.

  After that, there was no question about whether he’d make the putt. He had desert voodoo magic in his hands. Another par, another extension. More disbelief from Day, this time caught on TV—his mouth hanging open, an incredulous smile on his face. He later put words to the expression: “Why won’t this guy go away?”

  Twitter blew up, with the likes of Graeme McDowell, Jason Dufner, Gary Player, and Tom Watson expressing their astonishment. Much was made of the fact that the name “Dubuisson” loosely translates to “of the bush.” Javier Ballesteros, son of legendary Spanish golfer Seve, put the thoughts of many into words when he wrote, “It doesn’t matter who wins, Victor Dubuisson is my new hero! #magic.”

  “Haven’t seen short-game magic like that since Seve,” added Rory McIlroy.

  John Peterson put it this way: “There is no tweet that can justify how nasty those 2 up and downs were.”

  When Day described how it felt to watch Dubuisson hit those incredible escape shots from the desert, his answer doubled as a metaphor for his life.

  “It was just like you’d turn the mountain and you’d see more mountain,” he said. “And like, God dang, you’d come to the part every time where you just felt like you just couldn’t go anymore. But I’m like, no. I’m going to push until I can’t push. If I need to play thirty-six more holes, if I need to come back Monday, if I need to come back Tuesday—I don’t care how long it’s going to take. I’m going to win, and I’m not going to stop.”

  The next two holes were both halved, which brought them back to no. 15, the drivable par four. Both took out their drivers—the time for laying up had come and gone. Dubuisson hit first, landing his tee shot in the rough to the right of the green. Day did the same. Crucially, though, he kept it close enough to have a reasonable pitch from the rough. He stopped it close to the hole, leaving himself a birdie attempt. Dubuisson’s own pitch, from the deeper grass, got nowhere close; his short-game Santeria had finally run out. His long try went begging, and when Day knocked his birdie home, the odyssey was over.

  —

  In the hectic aftermath, Feherty grabbed Dubuisson to conduct a post-match interview. He seemed to be expecting some type of enthusiasm, but the Frenchman was totally, unrepentantly, and incorrigibly himself. He muttered his way through a few questions, mentioned that he hit some terrible shots, and seemed ambivalent about his incredible desert escapes. Feherty, who is just as funny as he seems on TV, can usually coax blood from a stone. With Victor, though, he’d met his match. The interview was a dud, and when the camera stopped rolling and Dubuisson had walked away, Feherty shook his head and sighed.

  “Shoot me now,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Shoot. Me. Now.”

  —

  Day had no such inhibitions. It had taken him almost four years, but he was a winner again, and he did it by surviving the greatest duel—and the last—in Accenture Match Play history. At that moment, every dream was in reach.

  * * *

  *1 It turns out they use an irrigation system that takes advantage of reclaimed “effluent water,” which is a euphemism for partially purified waste water from sewage works or factories. Every time you flush a toilet in Phoenix or Tucson, you’re supporting the PGA Tour.

  *2 Unlike stroke play, match play golf is measured by holes. Winning a hole by shooting a better score means a player is 1-up, and his opponent is 1-down. If the opponent wins the next hole, the match goes back to “all square.” It ends when one player is up by more holes than remain to be played, and that’s how the victory is noted. For example, if a player goes up by four holes after the 15th hole, with just three holes left, the match ends with a “4&3” win. In the Ryder Cup, matches can be “halved,” with each side getting a half point, but at the Accenture, tied matches go to extra holes until somebody wins.

  *3 It’s worth noting that certain details of Day’s biography tend to change or evolve from year to year, from story to story—particularly the parts that relate to his father’s death, and his move to Kooralbyn. In 2011, USA Today’s Steve DiMeglio wrote that his mother had taken a second mortgage on her home to send him to school, and this detail also appeared in other stories at the time…either because other writers had read DiMeglio’s version, or because Day repeated the detail in other interviews. On the day I interviewed him, at Concession Golf Club in Florida, he simply said that his mother borrowed money from an uncle to pay for school. Sports Illustrated’s Alan Shipnuck and Karen Crouse of T
he New York Times, who interviewed him the same day for the same type of story, wrote that she sold the house outright. These discrepancies can probably be ascribed to the ambiguity with which Day views his own childhood, and the extent to which trauma erased many of the details…or at least clouded them in his memory.

  4

  PALM BEACH GARDENS, FLORIDA

  Russell Henley, Rory McIlory, and the Moving Needle; The Honda Classic

  “This game…seems like the harder I try, the harder it is.”

  —RUSSELL HENLEY

  With the onset of spring, the Tour leaves the West Coast. Gone are the jaw-dropping ocean vistas of Pebble Beach, the electric hustle of Los Angeles, and the violent beauty of the desert. In their place, we get the Florida swing—a monthlong trek, from Palm Beach Gardens to Miami to Tampa to Orlando, through a state without a soul. Somewhere in this mess, I became convinced, was the exact spot where the American dream turned into a nightmare.

  Traveling across the country almost always gave me a deeper appreciation for the spirit and diversity of my native land, but in Florida I found an exception. This was our national heart of darkness—a crowded, endless stretch of homogenous highways and homogenous homes blurring together in a feverish hallucination of stucco and palm trees, broken up by chain restaurants and box stores. Without knowing it, I had embarked on a depressing journey that felt claustrophobic from the very start. The entire month was an extended vision of uniformity and tacky commerce run amok. Soon, a creeping sort of ennui had me in its grips, and I had vague thoughts of driving to the Everglades and renting an airboat and a swamp-side villa just to clear my head. God knows what would happen to me there, but at least if a fifteen-foot gator had me in its jaws, I’d feel something other than this bleak Florida dread.

  Paradoxically, though, I began to love the golf more than ever—it was the only escape. So I was present on the first day of March, when, after a third-round 68 at the Honda Classic, Russell Henley sat between two potted plants on a plush chair in the makeshift interview room at the PGA National Resort & Spa and fielded questions about Rory McIlroy.

  Henley, twenty-four and still a minor figure on Tour, was running up against a harsh reality that defines the vast majority of golf coverage in America. There are very few players who “move the needle”—an insidious piece of media jargon describing how certain content can drive traffic to a website, sell newspapers or magazines, or otherwise produce profit. Since golf is a niche sport, the only players who truly move the needle are icons—such as Tiger, Rory, and Phil—or buffoons, like John Daly.

  It doesn’t take a genius to see how this becomes a vicious cycle—if you tell casual fans only about Tiger, Rory, and Phil, they’ll only know—and care—about Tiger, Rory, and Phil.

  Resistance is futile. It’s the nature of the business of golf that mainstream outlets—by which I mean media giants that cover a broad selection of sports and aren’t golf-centric—will sacrifice depth of coverage in order to generate traffic by churning out content on the select group of needle-movers. It’s nobody’s fault; the writers get their mandates from the editors, who get their mandates from data, which dictates the happiness of the advertisers, which determines the bottom line. Jobs are at stake, and making an ethical stand is a poor career move. More than ever before, writers can be replaced, but traffic cannot.

  In this case, the questions about Rory were justified. Henley would enter the final round in second place, trailing the Next Tiger Woods by two strokes, and a close look at the Georgia alum gave you the distinct impression that he would be the helpless victim of a brutal ass-kicking in less than twenty-four hours.

  At first glance, Henley emits that cloying country club vibe—blond hair worn in the thick, side-swept style known as the “southern swoop” or “Bama bangs,” and a cocky grin that makes him look like the evil rich kid in an eighties teen movie. Watch him for longer than a minute, though, and that impression slips away as you start to notice two other quirks. First, his eyes—they default to a wide, awestruck stare, so that he looks like a child meeting his hero for the first time—or, as his college coach Chris Haack put it, “like a deer in headlights.” Second, his mouth, which hangs in a slack-jawed, insensible state, and combines with the shell-shocked eyes to give him the air of a mental patient who has just wandered into Times Square at rush hour.

  Henley is another Georgia boy—an all-state basketball player from Macon. He started golf late, but he became a surprising star at Georgia. With Chris Haack by his side, he went 5-0 over two years in NCAA match play golf, capping off his career with a win over Augusta State’s Henrik Norlander in the national championship match.

  As his presser wound to a close, a clamor rose outside the room as the crowds began to yell. You could hear the word “Rory!” floating up from the cacophony, and suddenly the mob had purpose. Just then, as if the scene had been choreographed specifically to terrify Henley, the sound of bagpipes pierced the din.

  The real explanation was innocent—Rory was next up with the press—but from inside, it felt like Henley was a pretender to the throne, waiting with trepidation as the true king arrived with his army at the castle gates.

  Then again, nobody knew exactly what to expect from Rory, either. He had solidified his status as the greatest young player in the game by winning two majors before his twenty-fourth birthday, but 2013 hadn’t been exceptionally kind to the boy wonder. Entering the season, the heir apparent no longer looked like the wunderkind of popular imagination. By his high standards, his last year had been a bit of a disaster, and critics harped on the so-called distractions. A sponsorship change from Titleist to Nike in November 2012, along with a pending lawsuit, had seemingly screwed up a very good thing.

  The Honda was just his second American event of 2014 after the Match Play, where he’d been eliminated on Friday, and it was America’s first real chance to see the new and improved Rory.

  “I’m currently in a little bit of a rebuilding phase, in a way,” he told us. “I feel like I’m much more experienced, I’m much wiser sitting here at twenty-four.”

  He also thought back to the 2011 Masters, which stood as the chief disappointment of his young career. After holding a four-shot lead heading into the final round, he closed with a disastrous 80 to drop all the way to 15th. Since then, he had never lost a 54-hole lead, and that was no coincidence—he’d learned not to play cautious and merely hope for a win, but to aggressively pursue it even from the top.

  For Henley, already trailing by two strokes, the situation looked untenable. He left the interview room, just one night’s sleep away from what became the strangest final round of the season.

  —

  If anyone expected Henley to make a move, they were keeping it to themselves. At PGA National, with its endless expanse of palm trees and water hazards, the final round went according to script for eight holes—Rory adhered to his “make them come to you” mind-set, and after a few birdies and bogeys for both, they were right back where they started heading to the ninth hole, -12 and -10.

  At that point, I noticed something odd—beyond a short greeting on the first tee, the two players hadn’t spoken to each other once. It was my first experience with Rory’s subtle, intimidating style, and it took almost nine holes before I noticed. Even now, after watching Rory for an entire season, I can’t tell if anything he does is intentional, or just the unconscious dominance of a superstar. He speaks only when it suits him, he rarely bothers to watch an opponent’s shot, and when he does turn his focus to another human, he has a way of looking through them.

  Everything is internal with Rory—he twists his mouth up on one side when he walks, lips pressed tight, as though he’s literally suppressing whatever judgment is on his mind, zipping it all up and letting you guess what he might be thinking. And while everyone is aware of his presence, he seems to be unaware of anyone else’s. Even the way he walks gives an ambiguous impression—his head bobs up and down, like he’s nodding at everyone he passes,
and his upper torso barely moves, so that if you watched him from the waist up, you might think he was riding a horse.

  You can sense greatness in him, but it’s not the aggressive superiority of Tiger Woods or the wild, reckless talent of Phil Mickelson. Instead, it’s a self-contained, quiet belief that resonates with unshakable confidence. It conveys a single message to his opponents: You will react to me.

  It’s very different off the course, where Rory is friendly, sharp, and quick to smile. The transformation he undergoes is strange to behold, and can be very uncomfortable to face in a competitive environment.

  Rory’s ascension to his former glory was still a few months away. His play became shaky almost out of nowhere on the seventh hole, and a bad chip on the ninth dropped him to one-over for the day. At that point, phones around me began to buzz, and the other media members who had been following the final group suddenly sprinted away in a mass exodus. Word spread rapidly in a series of urgent whispers—Tiger had withdrawn! Back spasms! Thirteenth hole! In a flash, I was alone with the two men most likely to win the golf tournament—the latest, greatest instance of move-the-needle journalism.

  —

  Henley had climbed within a shot, but a penalty on 10 cost him a stroke, and a hole later, a scoreboard told us that Ryan Palmer and Russell Knox had improved to -10. When Rory hit his drive in the rough on 12 and missed his long par attempt, he had accomplished the direct opposite of his goal—he had come back to the field.

  A photographer hit him with a rapid-burst shot on 13, a staccato sound that annoyed Rory—“Really?!” he yelled. Henley’s terrific approach to 11 feet led to a birdie that brought him to -9, just one shot away. We passed the modest fairway homes on 14, and after a mediocre approach, Henley sunk a thirty-seven-foot chip shot. He pumped his fist, and now there was a four-way tie for the lead.