Rory McIlroy Is Not Tiger Woods

I know, it’s not exactly a riveting title.  You don’t need a high level of deductive logic to figure out that a white kid from Northern Ireland is not the same person as a black guy from Southern California.  There are basically two stories coming out of Rory McIlroy’s dominant win at the U.S. Open yesterday.  Naturally the first is about McIlroy, who set or tied a dozen records this past week, including the lowest score in tournament history.  The second story, circulating more this morning, is about the failure of American golfers to capture any of the last five majors played, the longest drought in history.

Appealing to one’s readership base aside, the story is still largely about McIlroy.  Few could resist the temptation to immediately start comparing the young golfer to Tiger Woods.  It’s not entirely their fault.  Because Tiger is still the greatest thing to happen to golf in financial terms, somehow making the story about Woods, even indirectly, still draws attention to game.  I remember reading a large USAToday spread about McIlroy in the summer of 2008, when he was just 19 years old and Woods had just announced he would miss the remainder of the season.  Ironically, it was Tiger’s longtime friend, Mark O’Meara, who had made the initial comparison to some reporter, and thus the article.

Part of this, in fact a large part, is simply due to the media machine and its desire for money.  An injured Woods is still a story.  His enigma is still strong.  Beyond this, there are two reasons why we can’t really compare any golfer to Tiger.

Tiger Woods changed the game of golf.

This hints at one of the most overused and untrue clichés in sports.  Despite it’s catchiness, not all records are actually made to be broken.  No pitcher is ever going to top Cy Young’s 511 career wins.  No hockey player is ever going to match Wayne Gretzky’s 2,857 career points, or reach 200 points in single season as he did four times.  And so it is also true that no golfer will single handedly change the entire game of golf.

What Tiger did was earth shattering.  Literally.  He forced every decent championship course to add bunkers, trim down fairways, and replace tees at previously unimaginable distances.  Granted, his timing couldn’t have been better, as his rise came at the same time as new technologies in club forging and ball construction gave golfers more power, more control, and more spin as ever before.  Woods changed golf into the lower scoring game that it is today, where birdie is more important than par.  And as with technologies in most sports, limits are in place.  All the pros could be using better equipment, but can’t, because it would give them an unfair advantage.

As Woods mopped up the competition in the early 2000s, and courses scrambled to make themselves harder, each new generation of golfers coming in understood where the bar had been set.  There’s only so much a course can change, especially when you consider how old most of them are, and the limited amount of space to work with.  Tiger Woods was the first superstar of the age of specialization.  Children are being molded from ever-earlier ages to be the next star of a specific sport.   Rory McIlroy is a product of the same trend and grew up idolizing the very man who changed all standards.

Most of all, Tiger Woods is a black man in a predominantly white sport.  He won the 1997 Masters at Augusta National, a club historically known for its exclusivity and racism.  There are still no female members.  Although Woods has becoming something more because of the way he went on to dominate and change golf, we always have to remember what it meant in a sport that was mostly white.  It’s a sport that represented the social and economic differences of whites and blacks in this country.  Tiger’s win in 1997 was one of those rare moments in history where an athletic performance transcends sports.

One major victory is not 14 major victories.

When is the appropriate time?  I’m not exactly sure, but it will probably take the type of dominance Tiger Woods displayed when his career truly took off.  Starting with his win at the 1999 PGA Championship, Woods won 5 out of 6 major tournaments, his worst finish being 5^th place at the 2000 Masters.  His last four in a row was dubbed the “Tiger Slam.” 

Golf fans know that the Woods era ushered in a generation of golfers who emulated his game, knowing that the truly greatest are those who excel in all aspects.  Tiger’s heyday ended in the 2009 PGA Championship at Hazeltine when Y.E. Yang pulled off a feat that no one had ever been able to do.  Tiger had never lost a major holding the 54-hole lead until Yang did so, playing right beside him on that Sunday.  Maybe Woods was declining, but it was really the field finally catching up to his level of play.

In many ways, Rory McIlroy represents the leader of the pack of the new, younger, and stronger field forged in the Tiger Woods mold.  Michael Jordan influenced a generation of basketball players and we are now seeing the same thing in golf.  And while everyone can make the shots from time to time, McIlroy is showing that he can do it more consistently.  But I think we’ll have to hold off on calling him the next superstar until he pulls off a run akin to Woods’ in 1999-2001.  I’m not saying he won’t do it, I’m just pointing out that he hasn’t yet.

Congressional C.C. failed to live up to U.S. Open standards

In my preview to the U.S. Open, I talked about why I love this tournament so much.  That was because it is supposed to be the hardest golf tournament to win in terms of individual scoring.  I talked about how the USGA wants the winner to be right around even par.  Well, by those standards, Congressional failed miserably to force the field to remain humble.

Admittedly, this is partially no one’s fault.  A lack of rain before the tournament didn’t allow the rough to grow to the length the USGA wanted.  Then rain during the tournament softened the course up enough to the point where fairways and greens were considerably easier to stick.  There were low scores all over the place but Rory McIlroy was the one who was able to string together four great rounds.  This made it more like an average tournament and the 20 players under par are the 2^nd most in U.S. Open history.  I’m not trying to take away from what he did; I’m just saying the rain didn’t let the course test the players.  In the end, Congressional was maybe just a poor choice compared to Pebble Beach or Bethpage Black.

The comparison to Woods is made best when you’re talking about McIlroy’s age, as he is the second youngest player to win a major behind Tiger.  But it’s not like we haven’t seen a dominant major win recently.  Does anybody remember Louis Oosthuizen’s decisive seven shot British Open victory at St. Andrews last year?  I know Rory McIlroy does.  He had to play his Friday round in the wind and rain, and shot an 80 after an opening round of 63.  Oosthuizen played later in the day on Friday when it was nice out, shot a 67, was 12 under after two rounds, and never looked back.  You can blame it on the weather, but Louis still played better than everyone else, just like Rory, and both were equally boring to watch.

You can’t take away the records McIlroy broke, but we all have to admit he only broke them because of the conditions at Congressional.  His eight shot margin of victory is only one better than Oosthuizen’s from last year, and no where near the 15 stroke victory Tiger Woods had in the 2000 U.S. Open.  McIlroy did not blow up on Sunday the way he did earlier in the year at the Masters, but there was also no Tiger shooting five under on the front 9, making the galleries rush to watch him and forcing Rory to deal with the famous roars.  Every golfer on tour says it’s different when he’s playing, even today, and that was evident in April.

But he’s clearly got some of the best, if not the best game out there and is only 22 years old.  That I will not deny.  Without Woods, he probably is the easiest pick from the field to win the remaining two majors this season.  He handled the pressure of putting himself in the same place where he had failed before, but the difference now is that the media is hawking him.  They know that Tiger can always come back, that he’s still golf's biggest star.  But the difference now is there’s someone who might still be better.  Rory’s got an immense amount of pressure on him to be the next superstar.  He’s already got Padraig Harrington saying he’ll make a run at Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major victories.

McIlroy is just getting started and only the future can tell just how far he’ll go.  The world’s eye is certainly on him, but if he can fire off majors the way Woods once did, he will gain that superstar status.  Sure, no one will ever change the game like Tiger did, but there’s a chance someone may eclipse his own records, even if Woods doesn’t finally eclipse Jack.  Let’s face it; the world of golf (and its financial partners) will be most happy to have two superstars like tennis with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.  I can see it now: two beasts of the game showing their best, battling down to the triumphant finish.  Tiger Woods and the product of his influence pulling off shots we only think are possible in our dreams; that’s a game I want to see.