Scrutinizing Woods’s Game, and His Sportsmanship

AUGASTYA,GA-hortly after Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer reunite on Thursday morning to hit the honorary opening tee shots in the Masters, 96 golfers will begin battling their own jangling nerves and a firm and fast Augusta National golf course.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Tiger Woods signed autographs after a practice round Wednesday. He has pledged to try to “not get as hot when I play.”

This is where spring begins, on golf’s finest stage, with the game and its players on display at the year’s first major championship. And this year there will be an additional subplot, centering on the prodigality of one of the four-time champions, Tiger Woods, and his attempt to rebuild a fallen image and restore his golf game as the standard against which all others are measured.

The quantifying begins now, inside and outside the ropes, and Woods’s behavior will be scrutinized as closely as his scores. Measures of his success and failure this week will hinge in part on whether Woods will keep some of the promises made at the beginning of the week, including one about his widely criticized tendency toward angry, profanity-laced outbursts and thrown clubs over bad shots.

Woods promised he would try to “not get as hot when I play.” This is not likely to be an easy promise to keep.

It is not that Woods will be expected to start signing autographs during play, or to chat with fans the way Palmer used to as he looked for an errant drive. No one thinks he will high-five or fist-bump spectators à la Phil Mickelson.

This will be about not erupting in a string of obscenities, as he has on numerous occasions during the past 10 years. It started with the infamous tirade on the 18th tee at Pebble Beach in 2000 during the United States Open, which he eventually won by 15 strokes. While completing the fog-delayed second round, Woods hooked his drive into the Pacific Ocean, and his outburst was captured by a microphone near the tee.

More recent examples include a slammed driver that bounced into the gallery last November at the Australian Masters, his most recent tournament. He also threw his driver into a swampy area in front of a tee at the Deutsche Bank Championship last year. Although his behavior had attracted isolated criticism previously, it was brought to the forefront in January when Tom Watson criticized Woods for “his swearing and his club throwing, that should end.”

But the roots run deep. It was Woods’s father, Earl, who might have planted in his son the notion that swearing on the course was just something that people would have to get used to.

“You can’t have it both ways with Tiger,” Earl Woods told Golf Digest in 2001. “You can’t have charismatic abilities to execute the marvelous shots and then chastise him when that same passion causes him to overload when he hits a bad shot.

“Specifically about swearing, it’s a — I won’t say a cultural thing; it’s a family thing. My father could swear for 30 minutes and never repeat himself.”

His son does not believe he can rein in one without losing the other, and he said so in what sounded more like a threat than a promise.

“When I’m not as hot, I’m not going to be as exuberant either,” Woods said. “I can’t play one without the other, and so I made a conscious decision to try and tone down my negative outbursts, and consequently I’m sure my positive outbursts be will calmed down as well.”

Woods is certainly not the only PGA Tour player to blow up on the golf course. Tommy Bolt was a legendary club thrower, club breaker and swearer during his heyday in the 1950s. Curtis Strange was often fined for language unbecoming a professional, and became so enraged after one poor drive at Doral in the ’80s that he kicked the bottom of his golf bag while his caddie was carrying it, which sent the caddie to the ground and injured his back.

A lawsuit was settled out of court, with Strange paying the hospital bills and a sum of money for damages. Unbeknownst to many fans, Fred Couples is not always the calm, benign embodiment of cool. When a tee shot found a bad lie in a bunker during the Tournament of Champions at LaCosta in the ’90s, Couples was caught uttering some words that are still not permissible on the public airwaves.

Similarly, when a local reporter trailing Couples followed him and his errant drive into the woods at a P.G.A. Championship, she overheard him using an unflattering adjective in front of the word “schmoes” to describe some fans who had applauded the shot.

Though prominent, none of these players in these examples were held to the same standards as Woods, whose image as a role model was carefully crafted and maintained by his sponsors and handlers.

Even Bob Jones, the venerated co-founder of Augusta National and the Masters, struggled with his temper as a young man. In 1921, the 19-year-old Jones was playing the third round of the British Open at the Old Course at St. Andrews when he drove his ball into a fairway bunker, from which three attempts did not extricate his ball.

Jones promptly pocketed the ball, tore up his scorecard and withdrew from the tournament. He later apologized profusely and vowed to change his ways. He was one of the few who were able to do so.

And now the tournament Jones started at the club he co-founded will be the focus of a very public attempt by Woods to do the same. Billy Payne, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters, called out Woods during his public remarks Wednesday and said that Woods would be measured by the “sincerity of his of his efforts to change.”

“I hope he now realizes,” Payne said, “that every kid he passes on the course wants his swing, but would settle for his smile.”