Inside Tiger Woods' misery at The Open: RIATH AL-SAMARRAI on why the golf legend is deluded and how he has become a ceremonial player in every mind but his own

'At Pinehurst he did not seem to enjoy a single shot and you think, “What the hell is he doing?” He’s coming to Troon and he won’t enjoy it there either. There is a time for all sportsmen to say goodbye, but it’s very difficult to tell Tiger it’s time to go. Obviously, he still feels he can win. We are more realistic.’ Colin Montgomerie, July 2024 

I followed Tiger Woods for a couple of holes on Friday and it’s a peculiar kind of relationship he shares these days with the game he redefined. Love, he would call it a couple of hours later, but it was hard to see what he meant around the links of Troon.

There was plenty from the galleries, because that is a given. We would say the same for the other golfers. They idolise him, hanker and claw for his approval, and he made them all richer. Still does.

But the love between Woods and golf? His golf? That’s different, of course. It’s a dance of jaded acquaintances by now, whatever he tells us to our faces. His golf mistreats him. It taunts him. And he scowls right back and demands too much, so round and round they go, bickering and sniping, this pair of strangers who were once so besotted.

I caught a sight of it all on the inward nine of his second round and he had that sad feel about him as he made his slow amble up the bank to the 15th tee, 13 over par for the tournament by then. He wore the look with which we are well familiar - eyes puffy and trained on the floor, jaw clamped, shoulders stooped, exhausted, hollowed out by a few realities.

A minute earlier he had missed a three-footer at 14 and so he wasn’t in the mood for the outstretched hands of children. He just wanted to get the driver in his glove and, when he did, he stared out across the bumpy terrain of a nasty 500-yarder and then sliced deep into the fescue up the right. Woods sighed and began that walk of the damned all over again, shaking his head and stepping into that little limp.

Love? Not there. Not in that instant. Drive it to the airport and have your agent do the rest.

But what does love look like to Tiger Woods anyway? It’s a layered question, that one, so we’ll keep it to the sport. Is it the struggle for small gains? Is it the fear of the alternative, of breaking up and the silence that comes next?

Or is it the fleeting satisfaction of knowing, like we all do, that one good shot can make this maddening game feel better for a while? Is that where he is now, aged 48 going on 70, and is that why, for the shortest of moments, he allowed himself a faint smile when he dug his second stroke out of the abyss, up onto the breeze, and down again to the mounds that rolled his ball to within 10 feet of the cup?

What a shot. What a roar. What magic and there is no magic in golf like Tiger magic. And how we all want to see them work this out.

But they won’t and only one man in the world believes they can. That being the same man who then missed the birdie putt and walked off to the 16th, passing the outstretched hands all over again on his way to missing another major cut by a mile. Love moves in mysterious ways indeed.

Naturally, I thought about Colin Montgomerie during all of this. It’s why I was there, walking in Woods’s paw prints three days after the jokes went around. There had been a murder in the media tent. An assassination. When the hoovers had started up on the Tuesday night, we had sniggered they were picking up pieces of Monty.

Woods had done a job on him, just as he had at St Andrews in 2005. That was a four-shot procession to his second of three Open titles; what happened on Tuesday was a single bullet between the eyes.

Montgomerie had spoken for just about everyone in the game by questioning why Woods does it to himself and yet he had also committed the cardinal sin by doing so.

‘Well, as a past [Open] champion, I’m exempt until I’m 60,’ Woods had said when Montgomerie’s comments were raised. ‘Colin’s not. He’s not a past ­champion, so he’s not exempt. So he doesn’t get the opportunity to make that decision. I do.’

With a little pushing, Woods had more to say: ‘When I get to his age, I get to still make that decision, where he doesn’t. I’ll play as long as I can play and I feel like I can still win the event.’

It was great copy. But it was also cruel, unnecessary and, in the context of the final nine words, delusional.

As with links golf, there were multiple routes to the hole in answering the question and he chose to belittle someone for airing the greatest non-secret in sport. Montgomerie had spoken the truth and it goes without saying that multiple truths can be true at once.

When Woods goes out on to a golf course these days, I don’t see a contender. But I see courage. I see bloody-minded spirit and I see the soul of a champion whose body can no longer play ball. I see a man who has completed only 32 competitive rounds since that car crash in 2021 and has shot in the 60s only three times and on 10 occasions has gone 77 or worse but still he chases a dream. I see a man who has missed cuts at the past three majors and who outwitted Augusta storms to survive to the weekend at the Masters and, my goodness, that was incredible.

Above all, I see a man who doesn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of another tournament win but I see dignity in abundance in how he keeps on trying.

But I didn’t see much dignity in what he said about Montgomerie, who had been correct in just about all of his comments. Woods is not realistic in thinking he can win and he does not appear to be enjoying the realisation that he was mortal after all.

I’d hope Woods maintains his delusion a while longer because no one brings electricity to a windy field quite like he does. But it would also be worth pointing out he didn’t get into the US Open at Pinehurst last month on a champion’s exemption. He got there by a special invitation. They rewrote their rules for him.

Because that is where he is at these days – he is a ceremonial golfer in all minds beyond his own. I’ll keep enjoying those ceremonies as and when they occur, just as he will continue grimacing his way through to their ending, finding an unusual kind of love from suffering as he does so.

Good luck to him. But it would be awfully regrettable if this final act of his career sees his most accurate shots reserved for slaying those who dare to state the obvious.

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It goes to show no stain burrows too deep in the fabric of football and, secondly, that Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s luck might be turning.