Grand Slam in Tiger's sights

The first thing you should know about the Grand Slam, modern golf division, is this: Nobody has ever won it. Not Ben Hogan, not Arnold Palmer, not Jack Nicklaus, not even Tiger Woods. Tiger's only halfway there now, but at better watercoolers everywhere people are talking like it's a done deal.

That's because when Woods took the first two steps toward the Grand Slam, at the Masters in April and the U.S. Open at soggy Bethpage last month, he made victory look easy, and no golfer has ever made winning look easy before, not since Bobby Jones, anyhow. In his press conferences Woods spouts the company line. He talks about the difficulty of the course, the competition, the sport they play. He's pretending to be a golf traditionalist. His record shows that what he is, in fact, is a golf radical.

Step 3 for Woods begins on July 18, at the British Open. The last guy to get this far was Nicklaus. In 1972 he won at Augusta and won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. The British Open, which rotates among eight or so courses, was at Muirfield in

Scotland that year, just as it is this year.

Muirfield is a classic windblown links course, on the short side (at 7,034 yards), with fast, narrow fairways and rough that engulfs small caddies, to say nothing of balls. It is considered by Nicklaus and many other of the best players to be the fairest of the British links courses and therefore the one best-suited to American golfers, who don't expect silly things to happen to well-struck shots -- and don't react well when they do.

In the weeks leading up to the '72 Open newspapers were filled with stories assessing Nicklaus's chances. The Sunday magazine of The New York Times ran a long feature written by Alistair Cooke that included a picture of Nicklaus sitting in a golf cart above the caption, "Toward the impossible dream." That's how the whole thing was viewed "back in the day," to borrow a phrase Tiger uses.

At William Hill, the chain of British betting parlors, the odds on Woods's winning the British Open are 11 to 8. You put eight pounds down on Woods, and the house gets the rest of the field -- Phil Mickelson, Sergio García, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh, defending champion David Duval and 150 others. If Woods wins, you get back a measly 19 pounds. The odds of Woods's winning the British Open and the PGA Championship in August at Hazeltine, outside Minneapolis, are 4 to 1, down from the 50-to-1 odds he was listed at before the Masters. If he wins both, it's the end of golf as we know it.

"What everyone thought was impossible, Tiger wants to prove is possible," says Nick Faldo, who won the British Open at Muirfield a decade ago. "He's ticked off he didn't get proper credit for winning the Grand Slam when he did."

In Woods's mind -- and Faldo's -- he has already won the Grand Slam. He won the U.S. Open in June 2000 at Pebble Beach, won the British Open a month later at St. Andrews, won the PGA Championship at Valhalla that August, then won the Masters the following April, in a new year and a new season. It was the most dominating stretch of golf ever played, but many observers couldn't bring themselves to drape the Grand Slam sash on Woods. They (we) cited a technicality, that the four wins have to be in the same calendar year, as if this stuff were codified somewhere. "Call it what you want, I had the four trophies on my mantel," Tiger says.

Woods was given an itty-bitty title all his own: the Tiger Slam. Evidently that phrase didn't satisfy him much, which is why we are where we are this year. The man, now 26, is ready. If you're not, you've got a little time to get your head out of the sand. The Internet is not a fad, and Tiger will win the Grand Slam. This year.

Woods has eight major titles. He's 10 behind Nicklaus, still the leader in the clubhouse, but only for a while. Faldo predicts that Woods will win at least 12 of the next 20 majors. Throughout his career Nicklaus has been the most gracious runner-up you could imagine. (He had plenty of practice, finishing second in a major 19 times.) He might be back in that role sooner than he could have possibly expected.

Nicklaus grew up on the legend of Jones, winner of a different Grand Slam. In 1930 Jones -- courtly Atlanta lawyer, iron-willed amateur golfer -- won the U.S. and British Opens and the British and U.S. Amateurs. They were the four most important tournaments of the day, a day when amateur golf was more closely followed than the pro game. The Masters didn't exist. That invitational tournament, for leading professionals and top amateurs, debuted in '34 and quickly became a high-status event for one reason above all others: Jones was its host.

Twenty-three years after Jones's sweep there was no consensus on what constituted the Grand Slam. The PGA Championship and the British Open overlapped, both played in early July. In 1953 Hogan, the crusty Texan, won Jones's event at Augusta, then won the U.S. Open at Oakmont. Hogan chose to play in the British Open, his first and only appearance in it. He won, at Carnoustie, and upon his return to the States he rode up Broadway in a convertible through streams of ticker tape. It was an achievement, winning the two big Opens and that young April tournament, the Masters, to boot.

Seven years later Arnold Palmer, at the height of his powers, won the Masters and then the U.S. Open, at Cherry Hills, outdueling Nicklaus and Hogan. A few weeks later he was flying across the Atlantic, first to play in a team event in Ireland, then to compete in the British Open at St. Andrews. On the flight over he was sitting with one of his buddies, the late Bob Drum, a Pittsburgh newspaperman. "I said to Drum, 'No one is ever going to win the two Opens and the two Amateurs in the same year again. The pro game is too big. They ought to have a new Grand Slam: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open and the PGA Championship.' Drum was an enterprising man, and he ran with it." Palmer finished second at the British Open that year, a stroke behind Kel Nagle.

That leaves us with the two most recent players to have won the Masters and the U.S. Open in the same year: Nicklaus in 1972 and Woods in 2002. Nicklaus began the British Open at Muirfield with a single purpose, a sore neck and long odds -- 50 to 1, by his own overly modest estimation, though the bookies had him as the 2-to-1 favorite. "I was consumed with the idea of winning the Grand Slam," Nicklaus says. "I had won all the majors, a couple of times each by that time, and that was the only thing I had not accomplished in my career. I couldn't help but be consumed with it."

Since Nicklaus was consumed with it, and Nicklaus's career is Woods's road map, you can imagine what Woods is feeling right about now. Woods is expected to play this week at the Western Open, near Chicago. You can't engage him in an extended discussion about the Grand Slam or even Muirfield. He is world class at responding to questions politely and emptily. But watch him at work at the Western, particularly if there's a big wind blowing, giving the players a preview of Muirfield's winds. He'll be the only guy truly loving it. He'll be playing the Western but looking ahead, honing his game for the British.

At Muirfield, Nicklaus opened with rounds of 70, 72 and 71. He'd won the Masters and the U.S. Open with MacGregor clubs, but at Muirfield he was using Slazengers, the clubs he was contracted to use outside of the United States. He played the course conservatively, often hitting an iron off the tee, just as he had done when he won his first British Open, also at Muirfield, in 1966. With his neck hurting -- a bad night's sleep did him in -- he couldn't make the swings he wanted. After three rounds he trailed the leader, Lee Trevino, by six. When he woke up on the morning of the last round, the pain in his neck was suddenly gone. (He's been traveling with his own pillow ever since.) Over breakfast he told his wife, Barbara, that he would win the British Open. Such confidence!

In the last round Nicklaus finally let it rip with the most lethal club in his bag, the driver, and made a barrage of birdies. Woods, a superb student of golf history, no doubt knows what Nicklaus did at Muirfield. With the fairways firm and fast, Woods can hit his two-iron off the tee as long as and straighter than other players hit their three-woods. Come Sunday, in the unlikely event that he needs to make up ground, he can remove the tiger headcover from his big stick and go really, really low.

In '72 Nicklaus closed with a 66 that left him a shot behind the Merry Mex. Nicklaus shook Trevino's hand as he came off the final green, told him he was a great and deserving winner and said, "But why don't you go back to Mexico?" Nicklaus loved competing against Trevino, a friend, but his loss to him at Muirfield, he says, ranks among the most disappointing moments of his career. The two golfers never talked in detail about the '72 British Open until a couple of weeks ago. Trevino told Nicklaus the gory details of how he had hacked up the 71st hole, chipping in for par nonchalantly when he figured he was out of it.

Before the tournament Palmer thought Nicklaus had a good chance at Muirfield because "everything was going for him," but in those days Arnie was still betting on himself. At the U.S. Open this year, in a bet with his girlfriend for stakes he would not reveal, Palmer took Woods against the field. He'll do the same at Muirfield.

"Tiger's focus is different from the other guys'," Palmer says. To a generation now gray-haired or bald or getting there, Arnie is still the King, but Woods has already passed him in majors won. "The other guys are trying to win a tournament," Palmer says. "Tiger has major goals in mind, big-time stuff, history."

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