MEDINAH, Ill. — Tiger Woods has done everything in golf. The list of things he has not accomplished in the game is shorter than the roster of women members at Augusta National.
Woods owns 14 major championships and has 74 career PGA Tour victories.
He has proven himself as one of the greatest pressure players the game has ever seen as evidenced by him closing out 14 of 15 majors in which he entered the final round with a share of the lead and by his 11-1 career record in playoffs.
If Jack Nicklaus is the greatest player of all time with his record 18 majors, Woods is a close second. Yet curiously, the pedestrian 13-14-2 record he carries into the 39th Ryder Cup record does not come close to matching the dominance he has displayed in individual competition.
Woods is playing in his seventh Ryder Cup this week and has been a part of just one winning team, dating back to his first in 1997 at Valderrama.
How is it possible the greatest player of the current generation has been so ordinary in Ryder Cup play? How can Woods, during the heart of his most dominant years, have been on five losing teams in six tries?
“Well, certainly I am responsible for it, because I didn’t earn the points that I was put out there for,’’ Woods said yesterday. “I needed to go get my points for my team and I didn’t do that. Hopefully, I can do that this week and hopefully the other guys can do the same and we can get this thing rolling.’’
Woods’ contemporaries offered different theories about his Ryder Cup struggles.
“It’s a huge game for an underdog to play a Tiger Woods and [players] get up for it,’’ Graeme McDowell said. “I liken it to playing Premiership football, [with] the biggest teams, the Manchester Uniteds, the Liverpools, the Chelseas, the Arsenals [when] any lesser team that comes to play these guys have a tendency to raise their game,
“They are not expected to win. When expectation levels drop, game tends to improve. I think a guy who plays Tiger Woods … and he doesn’t expect to win … he lets it all go and he plays out of his skin and gets the upset. That’s the only reason I can come up with.
“Tiger Woods is perhaps the best player to ever play the game of golf,” he added. “Why is his Ryder Cup record not reflecting what he [has done] individually [which] is so phenomenal? It would be very hard to emulate that at the Ryder Cup, because to win a point here at the Ryder Cup is so difficult because of the quality of golf and the things that happen.
“It’s very difficult to be critical of Tiger and a guy of his caliber. It’s hard to win points and guys raise their game for this thing.’’
To push a pin into the balloon of McDowell’s premise that lesser players overachieve to beat Woods, consider that Nicklaus had a 17-8-3 career Ryder Cup record.
Woods does have some positive karma going for him this week at Medinah. He went 3-1 in the 2010 Ryder Cup in Wales despite the Americans’ loss as a team and he has won the 1999 and 2006 PGA Championships at this course.
Jim Furyk, who has been a teammate of Woods’ in all six Ryder Cups he’s played in, said he wasn’t even aware of Woods’ record.
Informed of the 13-14-2 mark, Furyk said, “Yeah, with as dominant as he was through most of those years I think anyone would be a little surprised to see a .500 record.
“But also that has a lot to do with [the fact that] no one has an extremely good record on our team and that would be because we haven’t won a lot of these matches,’’ Furyk said. “If we all had a 75-percent winning percentage, we would be 5”‘2 rather than 2”‘5 [in his seven Ryder Cups].’’
When Furyk was informed that Woods has a 4-1-1 singles record in Ryder Cups, he said jokingly, “So, yeah, that’s probably the rest of our fault then. There’s my theory.’’