The Open 2010: Tiger Woods dumps his new putter but old problems persist

There was to be no third title for Tiger Woods on the Old Course. No 15th major nailed at the home of golf. Heroics of a level unprecedented for him, and indeed in Open championship history, would have been required from the world's No1 player, together with a meltdown from each of the 17 players above him on the leaderboard. But after another day of drudgery on the links, he holed out from three feet on the final green for the par that left him precisely where he had been when the round started. He doffed his cap to the galleries and was gone, to the airfield, his Gulfstream and his Florida sanctuary. "What memory will you take with you?" he was asked before he departed. "The fact that I didn't win," he responded. Winning is what Woods has done better than anyone else in the modern game. Competition is in his blood. But any smidgeon of that remaining in this most fertile of golfing minds disappeared as he executed his mid-iron approach shot to the 4th green. A full dozen strokes behind after three rounds, there were those counselling caution in assuming the young South African leading the field would sail majestically on rather than imploding in the face of an onslaught from the pack. Remember Nick Faldo, they said, and how he hunted down and humiliated Greg Norman at Augusta in 1996. Faldo outscored his rival by 11 strokes that day and Norman was never quite the same again afterwards. Remember again Paul Lawrie at Carnoustie, who was 10 shots adrift of the lead after three rounds, but won the Open in a play-off. This was not Woods on a cavalry charge, though. He runs from the front, playing catch-me-if-you-can. Not one of his major championship titles has been achieved without establishing a lead after three rounds. He likes his competitors to smell the exhaust fumes. Something has been missing from his game all week, though, an element that has been gnawing away at him through his practice rounds and into the championship. One of the finest putters the game has seen had lost his touch on the greens. Before the first round he announced he was abandoning his faithful putter and using a new one. That lasted three rounds. Today the old friend was back in the bag, the upstart kicked out. Much good it did him. By his estimation he had "around nine three-putts" in the four days, and that, he will argue, is the difference between competing for the title and being an also‑ran who could not outscore the amateur two matches behind him. There is a mortality to Woods now. He still dressed in his habitual last-day red, but it seemed symbolic rather than the power source it once appeared. Players know what he can do, but he no longer scares the pants off them. By the time the 3rd hole had been completed Woods had clawed back a couple of shots: at the 1st, where his tee shot favoured the left side of the fairway and allowed him the perfect angle into the pin, leaving him a gentle right‑to‑left, eight‑foot putt; and at the 3rd, where another perfect angle from out to the left allowed him to pitch to five feet. "I knew the start I had to get off to," he said, "and I was two-under through three. If I could only make a birdie on four and a birdie or even eagle on five, then it would have felt like something could happen." His drive down the 4th was perfect. Another good angle. But now there was a change in the wind. All day it had been brisk, snapping the flags. Links weather. Now there was a lull. Gone was the wind roar in the ears and instead, from back down the course, came the noise as a birdie was sunk on the Road Hole. The wind whispered. Woods's approach went long, left and into sand. Had he and his caddie Steve Williams miscalculated the distance? Was it a bad swing that had him snapping the shot long and left into sand? Or was it that he had tried to hold the ball up against a wind that for those brief seconds was no longer there? No sooner had Woods reached the green than the flags began to crack again. It took him two attempts to extricate himself from the bunker, the first failing to clear the lip and rolling back in, and two putts meant a double bogey. That, to all intents and purposes, was the game up. He was just off the green on the par‑five 5th, but three‑putted for par – a shot gone effectively – and had to play backwards out of another fairway bunker on the 7th, and three‑putted when he did reach the green for another double bogey. By the time he reached the tee of the par‑three 8th, he looked done. He aimed 30 yards to the right of the flag, at the town spire in the distance, and saw the ball draw back on the wind. "Get in the hole" bellowed a fellow who looked like a Tam o' Shantered Danny DeVito. Get on the green might have been more apt. The ball skittered through the back and as it did so Woods bent at the waist and slumped. He had had enough.