Columnist Dean Juipe: Tiger needs just one mulligan

Dean Juipe

Monday, June 19, 2000 | 10:15 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

The swear words came effortlessly and were ripe with emotion. The outburst -- a virtual fusillade of no-nos -- was picked up by a microphone and broadcast to a disarmed, if unsuspecting, national television audience.

However unseemly the offense, it was Tiger Woods' only mistake of a glorious weekend. In spite of hitting his second-round tee shot at the 18th hole into the Pacific Ocean and compounding the error with a few off-color remarks that were a little too audible for his own good, his play in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach was stunning and historically significant.

Achieving the near impossible, he took the final-round suspense out of the tournament and won Sunday by a daunting 15 strokes.

Woods did the last thing his fellow competitors wanted him to do: He grabbed the lead early and led wire to wire. The pretournament betting favorite in both Las Vegas and London, he smoked the field right from the start.

No one had less of a reason to cuss, but, darn it, that's Woods. His competitive nature sometimes gets the best of him; in the case of his Saturday morning shot off the tee at 18, the blue flew.

He bogeyed the hole and was charged with a bogey for lack of decorum. It was a blunder, a meltdown, a human failing by a man whose golf game is decidedly inhumane as it pertains to those looking to share the sport's vast riches.

You're not supposed to do what Woods was able to do at Pebble. Scores of 65 (the lowest ever for a single round in the Open), 69, 71 and 67 contrasted sharply with how the field was faring, as there were 51 rounds of 80 or better as the long rough, the hard greens and the temperamental breeze made par a tenuous goal.

Pebble was set up to play tough and it did. It's just that Woods evaded its clutches.

He won a tournament that may have had the words "United States" in its title yet was robustly international. Look at the last six twosomes in the final-round pairings and there was Woods, two Englishmen, two Spaniards, an Australian, an Irishman and a South African.

So much for the notion of rich white guys utilizing their stateside country club upbringings to humble those inferior foreigners. Golf, particularly when the conditions are this rugged, not only favors no special ethnic group, it forces the type of improvisations that even the leading American players don't always have mastered.

But Woods is atypical and he made this prestigious tournament atypical with his dominance. So debilitating was his lead that Lee Janzen, who was on the fringe of the leader board at the time, let fly a risky shot during the third round at 18 that TV announcer Johnny Miller said was done solely for "its entertainment value."

Woods reduced the field to playing for laughs or to amuse a TV audience that may have been feeling cheated out of the tournament's usual drama.

For that, he owes no apologies or answers.

On that other matter, however, he may owe St. Peter -- or his Buddhist equivalent at the threshold of the pearly gates -- an explanation for his solitary lapse of judgment.

Maybe he can ask for a mulligan.