By John Hawkins
Stephen Dunn/Getty Images
May 2, 2008
For Adam Scott, the road to golf's highest level has been a four-lane highway with a rest stop every couple of miles. He began 2007 ranked third in the world but entered last week's EDS Byron Nelson Championship at No. 10, an apt reflection of a player who piles up lots of high finishes but never seriously has contended at a major. Scott's six PGA Tour victories are evenly spread over five-plus seasons in the U.S. More often than not, winning has proven considerably more difficult than it should have been, although Scott hasn't double-bogeyed the 72nd hole to lose a tournament, either.
At age 27 his career has become the property of subjective perspective. Underachiever? That would be awfully harsh, although anyone standing on the 18th tee at the TPC Four Seasons last Sunday night might still be wondering why Tiger Woods isn't lying awake at night worrying about a curly-haired Aussie who is movie-star handsome and, every once in a while, nothing less than awesome.
On the first of what would be a three-hole playoff against Ryan Moore (both finished at seven-under 273), Scott unloaded a 333-yard draw on the 18th, a par 4 with water down the left side, a textbook collision of power and precision that finally came to rest in the center of the fairway, 60 yards closer to the flag than Moore's drive into the right rough. From there, Scott nipped a low-altitude sand wedge that stopped 15 feet right of the hole, but for all he had just done to end this playoff moments after it started, he babied the game-winning putt with a tentative stroke and mindset of a man who led by three.
No blood, and back to the par-3 17th, where Scott carried the greenfront pond by no more than two yards, a shot even Evel Knievel would have thought gutsy. The bold play left him an uphill, inside-the-hole eight-footer, but Scott burned the left edge and Moore, whose first putt was from about 80 feet, canned a six-foot comebacker for par, sending two of the decade's more heralded phenoms back to the 18th.
This time Moore held the edge off the tee. Scott's drive found the right fairway bunker he had aimed at all week. His approach came up 10 yards short of the green's midsection, leaving him a 48-foot, no-way-José putt from the front third to a deep-left pin. Just when it looked as if this battle might last until dark, Scott holed the bomb for his first U.S. victory in more than a year and another temporary exemption from the angst of what might not have been.
"I kind of got away with it today," he said afterward. "I was a bit lucky, certainly on the putt, and in the end, I learned I could actually win without things going my way, but this wasn't quite the statement I had in mind."
Perhaps not, although one senses the 2008 Nelson champ is just as dangerous over a 50-footer with six feet of break as an eight-footer with no wiggle, especially when a trophy is on the line. Beyond his enormous talent, lanky build and classic golf swing, Scott bears some striking resemblances to Davis Love III. Both are ultra-gentle, kind-hearted people whose niceness is easy to depict as a competitive weakness. They can hit shots and hole putts few others have any business even trying to execute, but as the tasks get simpler and performance expectations rise, so does the level of internal anxiety.
It's called a dilemma. Do those with gifted bodies and passive souls manufacture some artificially flavored intensity in an attempt to vanquish the doubt that festers inside? "I don't play well if I get too pumped up, if I don't bring myself back down to hit a shot," Scott said. "I was grinding today. I was playing hard, and I wasn't going to let it slip away. I felt like I'd worked hard all week to get into this position."
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