Showdown Turned Into a Letdown

Just use your imagination and pretend it’s Sunday at Augusta National, I told myself. Feel the mounting pressure. Smell the azaleas.

Then I realized I have no idea what azaleas smell like.

Nothing I tried could have made Monday’s Showdown at Sherwood between Tiger Woods and David Duval exciting.

I wanted to give it every chance. I wasn’t one of those people who viewed the made-for-TV event as an affront to golf.

It shouldn’t have mattered that there was nothing at stake, that there was no one else on the course. This was Tiger Woods. David Duval. I’d make that laborious trek up the 405 and across the 101 just to watch Tiger on the driving range or Duval hit short irons onto the pitching green.

Besides, what other sports event would you rather be watching? The sorry Dodgers? Rupert Murdoch was at Sherwood Country Club, and he owns the Dodgers.

I saw this as the completion of a fantasy 30-hour sports convergence in Los Angeles. Andre Agassi vs. Pete Sampras and Woods vs. Duval on consecutive days in town. A lucky lottery ticket for the sports nut. There was even a little taste of hoops action, a chance to see some Vince Carter acrobatic dunks, high-flying Allen Iverson layups and old school Magic Johnson no-look passes at Magic’s charity game Sunday night.

Sampras vs. Agassi was the best of the bunch. It wasn’t just that they were meeting in the finals of the Mercedes-Benz Cup. I never even thought about the tournament title at stake during their match. That didn’t even matter. It was Sampras vs. Agassi, playing high-caliber tennis, and it was all good.

It’s not that the Woods-Duval matchup didn’t mean anything so much as that they didn’t have anything to bring to the table. Sampras and Agassi had played each other 24 times before Sunday, including four meetings in Grand Slam finals. We knew what to expect when they met. Plus, Agassi had his career Grand Slam and Sampras had his 12 Grand Slam event titles.

Woods’ victory in the 1997 Masters was the only major that he and Duval have achieved, and we’ve never watched them walk side by side down the last few holes on Sunday.

This was supposed to give us a taste of what that would be like.

I thought it would be an advantage to have all the action right in one place. There would be no way to miss anything.

But you know what? I missed missing things. Hearing the roar of the crowd on the next hole and hustling to get a glimpse of the leaderboard are an intrinsic part of tournament golf.

It didn’t help that neither player was in top form. Duval couldn’t be after arriving from Connecticut on Sunday following his final round in the Greater Hartford Open, then getting only five hours of sleep. Woods hasn’t really played in the two weeks following the British Open and he said his touch around the greens was off.

And it seemed appropriate that this gimmicky event ended on a gimmicky hole layout. The Jack Nicklaus-designed course has a rock formation smack dab in the middle of the fairway about 300 yards from the 16th tee (in the order played Monday). “Jack’s little concoction,” Woods called it. Duval’s drive found it, causing him to lose the hole and fall two behind in the match-play format.

There never was a sense of urgency to this event. ABC and ESPN golf reporter Jimmy Roberts walked down the 12th fairway alongside Tiger, held out his microphone and asked him if he felt the same intensity as in a regular tour event.

Nothing against Roberts, but he already knew the answer. If this was a regular event and Woods was at peak intensity, he wouldn’t even be talking to him until after the final hole.

The atmosphere wasn’t right from the beginning. When Woods and Duval were announced at the first tee there was only a smattering of applause.

Woods said the fans got into it, but the 2,000 on hand weren’t enough to generate a big buzz. Maybe it was the challenge of trying to watch the golfers from behind a small army of marshals who stood inside the ropes on every hole that took it out of them.

The gallery thinned because some folks skipped ahead to other holes to stake out a good position and wait. You would think people who paid $100 to $550 to attend the event would want to catch every single swing. Perhaps they realized that they weren’t missing much if they didn’t.

Usually I like to follow the top competitors for all 18 holes on the last day of a golf tournament. I lasted four holes Monday before I succumbed to boredom and returned to the press tent to watch the event as it was meant to be watched--on television.

I went back down to the 18th hole, intrigued by the novelty of watching them play in the gathering darkness under the lights installed by ABC to accommodate the late start. As it turned out, they didn’t even reach the hole. Tiger clinched on the 17th, and I watched the event conclude on a cameraman’s six-inch monitor.

A disappointing end to a disappointing day.

The players enjoyed the format--”I’d like to be included in the future,” Duval said. So would I, if I knew I could get $1 million to win or $400,000 to finish second for one day of golf.

But the future for this event or anything like it won’t be determined by the players or the media or the fans in attendance. It was created for television, and will be judged by television.

“It’s basically up to the ratings,” Woods said.

On a day in which so much was artificial, nothing else rang so true.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Lowdown on the Showdown

Hole-by-hole results of match play between Tiger Woods and David Duval, which Woods won, 2 and 1, at Sherwood Country Club (7,025 yards, par 72):

*--*

Hole Yards Par Result Score 1 385 4 Duval makes 10-foot birdie putt Duval 1-up 2 522 5 Duval 20-foot two-putt for par Duval 2-up Woods misses four-foot par putt 3 168 3 Woods 25-foot two-putt for par Duval 1-up 4 541 5 Woods makes 4-foot birdie putt All square 5 457 4 Halved All square 6 186 3 Woods wins hole after Duval lands Woods 1-up tee shot into water, concedes 7 537 5 Halved Woods 1-up 8 166 3 Woods makes 35-foot birdie putt Woods 2-up 9 446 4 Halved Woods 2-up Out 3,428 36 10 341 4 Halved Woods 2-up 11 531 5 Halved Woods 2-up 12 202 3 Woods makes 6-foot birdie putt Woods 3-up 13 459 4 Duval makes 8-foot par putt Woods 2-up Woods hits tee shot into hazard 14 534 5 Duval 12-foot two-putt for birdie Woods 1-up 15 425 4 Halved Woods 1-up 16 449 4 Woods wins hole as Duval concedes Woods 2-up after landing tee shot in hazard 17 232 3 Halved Woods 2 & 1 18 424 4 Not needed In 3,597 36

*--*