My Unexpected Birthday With Tiger Woods

Ed noted that September 3rd was Chris Miller's and Alan Lepofsky's birthday. Oddly enough, September 3rd, 1999 was the last time I had a birthday. Being quite satisfied with the age of 39, I stopped counting on that occasion. I was therefore not planning on having a birthday on September 3rd, 2004, but I had such an unexpectedly wonderful time that day that I have decided to acknowledge the official passing of a year and accept it as my 40th birthday. It really ranks as one of my two most memorable birthdays to date, and I'd even put it in the top ten most memorable times of my life. It was even such an amazing time that I gave passing thought to counting it as five birthdays and admitting that I'm 44, but... naaaah! ;-)

It started on Thursday night, just after I had finished making arrangements with my buddy Otto to get together to play a round of golf on Friday afternoon. My daughter called to tell me that I should change my plans. She was out with my wife. They were, in fact, celebrating my daughter's 14th birthday. We had all gone out for dinner, but my wife and older daughter stayed for a cabaret show, while my younger daughter and I came home. The change in plans was the result of a raffle at the cabaret. My daughter called to tell me that she had just won two tickets to the first round of the Deutsche Bank Championship golf tournament, taking place on Friday, September 3rd, at the TPC Boston Club in Norton, Mass, about an hour and a half's drive from home.

I've played golf (badly) since my grandfather taught me at around the age of 10. I don't play often these days, so there was an immediate dilemma between keeping my golf date with my buddy Otto, or going to the tournament. I've never been to a PGA Tour tournament before, and this one had the added attraction of having both Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh competing -- at a time when a showdown between the two of them for the number one world ranking is imminent. My daughter made it clear that although she had won two tickets, she didn't want to go herself. Golf just isn't her thing. (She does think Tiger Woods is cute, but not as much as Derek Jeter.) So, I called Otto to offer the choice of keeping our date to play or changing it to go to the tournament. He couldn't take off enough time to go to the tournament, but he encouraged me to go anyhow. We can always find another day to play.

So, mid Friday morning I got into my car to head down to Norton. I didn't try to get there for the morning rounds. I would have had to leave around 5 AM in order to beat traffic, and let's face it... I'm not that much of a golf fan. And, it turned out that although Vijay Singh was playing in the morning, Tiger Woods had a 12:50 PM tee time. I got to the parking area at around 12:15, which gave me just enough time to catch a shuttle bus to the course, hike in from the drop-off point, pick up a program, get myself beyond the disorientation creted by some incredibly bad signage, and find my way (the long way) to a good vantage point near the landing area on the 10th fairway. (Tiger was playing the back 9 first.)

From there, the next five and a half hours were absolutely extraordinary. I saw Tiger shoot 65 to tie for the first round lead. I got as close as a few feet from him as he was walking between two of the holes. I managed to position myself on one hole so that I was no further than 15 feet from where his ball landed off the tee and so I had a prime position for watching his approach shot -- which he nailed. I saw him hit one of his famous "flop shots" (a nearly full swing with the club head wide open, cutting underneath the ball so that it pops way up in the air but only a few yards forward, lands softly and comes to an immediate stop). I saw -- and heard -- him boom a couple of 350 yard drives. The sound of a golf ball when struck full out by Tiger Woods is distinctly different from that made by a mere mortal's golf shot, and even distinctly different from that made by most other professionals. I saw Tiger sink putts and give his famous fist-pump. And I saw him double over, trying unsuccessfully to keep from laughing out loud, when a loud-voiced spectator shouted out "jack-ass" because some employee in one of the concession tents was ignoring the polite "quiet please" requests from PGA officials and was continuing to pound loudly on a giant bag of ice cubes to try to break them up.

I know that golf is just a game, and although Tiger Woods is famous he's just an ordinary man, but there is something special about getting a close look at someone who is the very best in the world at something that is very very hard to master. I've been to championship tennis matches and seen great players, but I never got as close to them as I got to Tiger Woods on Friday. I've seen many great actors and musicians in live performances, but never as close as I got to Tiger. I've watched grandmasters play chess from as close a distance as I watched Tiger, but it was never one at the level of a Fischer, Karpov or Kasparov -- and besides, I can so much more easily appreciate the skill of Tiger Woods because I can understand the intricacies of a great golf shot even though I couldn't play it myself, whereas I can't even come close to understanding the intricacies of grandmaster-level chess. I've been to a World Series baseball game at Yankee Stadium, and sat in third row box seats so close to the field that I could hear the sound of Reggie Jackson's bat hitting his shoulder on the follow-through when he was swinging in the on-deck circle, but as great as the players and teams in that game were, and as thrilling as it was to be there, it doesn't compare. I wasn't watching one of the two or three greatest baseball player of all time, and at a minimum that's what Tiger is in golf.

I know it's not really that big a deal. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have watched Tiger Woods play golf from as close a vantage point as I had. Tiger is a famous celebrity, and he doesn't know me from Adam. But so what? I think a lot of the thrill that I experienced on Friday had to do with the fact that I got my love for golf from my grandfather, and although he passed away when I was still 16 we're still connected by golf. And by the way, my stopping counting birthdays at 39 is another thing that connects us. He claimed to be 39 for all the years that I knew him. He went to a few PGA tournaments and got to see the best players of his time play, so I think it's entirely fitting that now that I've seen the best player of my day, I've really completed my connection to him, so what the heck... I can be 40 ;-)