Nobody's perfect -- not even Tiger

For the first time in history, Tiger Woods was beaten after holding the lead going into the final round of a major championship.

Call it whatever else you like, but don’t call it a fluke.

Y. E. Yang, Asia’s first-ever major champion, was the best golfer over four rounds at Hazeltine Golf Course. There were no bad bounces, no weather catastrophes, and no slow-play warnings to affect the outcome of the match.

The defining moment of the tournament came when Yang holed out his chip for eagle from just in front of the 14^th green. Was it lucky to go in? Perhaps. But the shot was perfectly aimed and purely struck, and there was never any doubt it would at least be very close. Had it been Tiger who made the shot, fans would be debating whether it was one of the greatest clutch shots in history, but since it came from the club of perhaps the unlikeliest of heroes, it gets discredited a bit.

Here’s why that's wrong: Professional golfers do not get that way by accident. They work for it, and they are very skilled. Out of the over 50 million golfers worldwide, only 988 have earned so much as a dime playing professionally in 2009. So when Larry Mize chips in from 140 feet to win the 1987 Masters or Shaun Micheel hits an approach shot to within two inches to clinch the 2003 PGA Championship, it’s not because they’re lucky. It’s because they’re very, very good. Tiger just has these moments at an impossibly frequent rate – he’s the best golfer to ever live, and expecting anyone else to produce such moments at an equal rate is just plain stupid.

To those who try to marginalize Yang’s accomplishment by saying he’ll never do it again, I say: Who says he has to? As of right now, he owns one major championship. That’s one more than Sergio Garcia, Adam Scott, and Anthony Kim, each of whom have been ordained as Tiger’s biggest threat over the past 10 years. Well, we’re still waiting.

After Yang landed the knockout punch on 14, it was over. Tiger was still standing, but there would be no rally. If anything, the final margin should have been more than three strokes. Yang slid a putt just by the hole on the 15^th green to miss birdie and had a putt on hole 17 graze the hole before sliding out. The rally everyone expected Tiger to launch never materialized. He finished with bogeys on the last two holes of the tournament, the time when he most needed to make birdie.

For all of the hysteria of Tiger finally being beat, this instance was different for several reasons. Keep in mind, there are two forms of Tiger: One wins, and one doesn’t. When Tiger has everything clicking, he wins, and generally makes it look easy. When he misses putts or struggles with his driver, he doesn’t win. He merely finishes in the top-five, and that ability to still nearly win without playing his best golf is what makes him so good. It happens quite frequently, in fact. Over the past 10 years in majors, he has 12 wins and 12 non-winning top-six finishes.

Before this tournament, Tiger had at least a share of the lead going into the final round of a major tournament 14 times, and 14 times he was left posing with a trophy. Two rounds into the 2009 PGA Championship, he held a four-shot lead. All signs pointed to a step-on-your-throat, put it away, no questions asked third round from Woods that would have the trophy engraver getting a head start Saturday night.

And then it never came. For reasons that I will never understand, Tiger played to make pars in the third round and simply assumed his lead would stand pat. It did, but slipped from four strokes to two in the process. In reality, Tiger only had one impressive round – the first— and the fact that he kept the lead throughout the next two masked the fact that his scoring had gotten progressively worse, from 67 to 70 to 71. A small difference, but usually the difference between playing well and winning.

So, to clarify, it was not Tiger who changed, it was the circumstances. When Tiger has played to this level in the past, someone has always played better. It was inevitably going to happen here too, but in this case it took four rounds for someone to catch him instead of two or three.

It had to happen, though. Tiger wasn’t playing his best, and when he doesn’t play his best in a major championship, he doesn’t win. Nobody is that good. One statistic that doesn’t often get mentioned is the fact that Tiger has never won a tournament when trailing going into the final round.

Think of that statistic as saying Tiger has never won when he hasn’t played his best. But what happens when Tiger had the lead going into the final round when he wasn’t playing his best? Something had to give. He lost.

Even the greatest of all time can’t win when he doesn’t play his best.