Tiger's rally-less streak still a thing of mystery
He will get a chance to improve it in Kentucky in September.
The Masters
2. He never comes from behind to win majors.
I used to think this second one was way overblown. After all, the man has won 13 majors and he is only 32. Who cares if he won them from ahead, behind or while sitting on the hood of his Buick?
But watching the Masters Sunday, it hit me: We keep expecting Tiger to launch a serious Sunday comeback to win a major, and it never happens. He has never won a major when trailing after 54 holes. Not once.
This isn't the worst thing in the world. If Tiger goes the rest of his career without such a comeback, he will still win more majors than anybody ever.
And yet ... well ... it's fair to wonder if there is a reason for this.
Sometimes we need a stat to tell us the story of what we've seen. In this case, we need to watch Tiger when he trails in order to understand the stat. He looks like anybody else in contention.
Woods has shown an amazing ability to blow away the field — nobody in the history of golf has done it more impressively. When he is hot, he's untouchable.
But when he's not hot, he doesn't win majors — for the simple reason that he doesn't play well enough. That's not a criticism. It is a fact.
Remember when Tiger was a rookie and he won a tournament with what he said was his "C-plus" game? We can say two things about that now: One is that he rarely has his C-plus game anymore. The other is that he needs his A-game to win majors.
Hey, so does everybody else. But it would be nice to see Tiger pull a major out of his TW hat, just once.
He had his chance Sunday at Augusta National. On the par-5 13th, Tiger left his tee shot far to the right, forcing him to try one of those fun little shots where you hit the ball, hear a thwack and hope that it was the club hitting a tree instead of your arm splitting in two. He hit the shot squarely. He gave himself a short birdie putt.
And he missed it.
He had plenty of chances to go to 6-under or 7-under for the day and really put some pressure on Trevor Immelman. But he never did, and as Immelman was putting on 18, I realized how much our preconceived notions affect how we view a sporting event.
If Tiger had started the day with a two-stroke lead and his playing partner Brandt Snedeker had shot 77, we would have said that Snedeker crumbled in Tiger's shadow.
If Immelman had started at 5-under, six strokes behind Tiger, and shot even par, we never would have expected him to overtake Woods, because nobody ever does.
Well, the roles were reversed Sunday. So let's call this what it was: Immelman played as well as he needed to, but Tiger didn't make him play great. The hope that he would overtake Immelman was built solely on his name. He had as many chances to make a run as anybody in the field, and he didn't capitalize.
Woods' career has been so extraordinary that none of his golfing peers will come close to matching his achievements. We have to reach outside of golf to find suitable modern-day comparisons.
Well, what if Michael Jordan never led the Bulls back from a series deficit?
What if Alex Rodriguez ... oh, right. We know the answer to that one: A-Rod gets a lot of heat. Too much.
Tiger doesn't deserve that.
But amid all the praise he has earned, it's fair to throw this in there: When he leads after 54 holes, Tiger wins. And when he doesn't lead after 54 holes, he doesn't win.
Until further notice, those are the facts.
Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg is a contributor to FOXSports.com. An archive of his Free Press columns can be found here.
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