Orlando Magician

By John Hawkins
Photos by Chris Condon/PGA Tour April 6, 2009

Some lady yelled "playoff" from the other side of the lake as the final group arrived at the 18th green. Given the onset of darkness, the gravity of the moment, the anticipation of thousands and everything at stake, most players never would have heard the woman. Certainly, anyone who did wouldn't have thought twice about what she said.

Tiger Woods isn't just anyone, of course. He hears everything, but if his most common response is to not respond at all, some replies are much louder than others. He sees everything, too—the grain on a putting surface 20 minutes after sunset, a 16-footer on the left edge, the fastest route to immortality and nothing in his way—which is why he makes everything. Every putt that matters, anyway.

This time, the roadkill was Sean O'Hair, whose five-stroke lead after 54 holes of the Arnold Palmer Invitational vanished so swiftly you would have thought Tiger was worried about TV viewers giving up on golf and switching over to college basketball. "The goal was to cut it to two or three by the turn," Woods said of his deficit-reduction plan. "On the back nine, the goal was to [earn a share of the lead] as fast as I could."

It took him six more holes to get there, by which point the drama dial had been suitably adjusted, and if the outcome of that 16-footer for birdie at Bay Hill's 18th wasn't a foregone conclusion, it wasn't because we haven't seen it before. Woods' 66th career PGA Tour triumph will be remembered as one of the most riveting, a sequel even better than the buzzer-beater here last year.

That birdie was from 24 feet. That victim was Bart Bryant, although Tiger's hat, which he fired at the ground to punctuate a new-look victory celebration, came in a close second.

Bryant wasn't paired with Woods that afternoon. O'Hair was this time around, and that meant everything in terms of setting the stage for a duel. "It's not like it's the Tiger Show, and I'm out there just to watch him," O'Hair said. "That's the one thing the media thinks about guys out here, and it's not like that. We're trying to win golf tournaments, and he just happens to be that good."

Loosely translated, the guy who tripped on his five-stroke lead had a hard time concealing his disappointment. Woods' first win since knee surgery last June was his sixth as a pro at Arnie's Place, all since 2000, and matched his biggest rally from the 54-hole milepost in a PGA Tour event. The other five-stroke comeback also occurred in 2000, at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, but comparing the two is ridiculous—Tiger actually trailed Matt Gogel by seven shots with seven to play that Monday on the Monterey Peninsula.

That win was outrageous, this one heavily assisted. The Tiger Show? O'Hair did nothing less than successfully audition for a starring role. He made one birdie all day after piling up 14 in the first three rounds. He didn't hit a fairway until the par-5 sixth, missed a four-footer for par at the seventh and began the back nine with a sloppy bogey, cutting his advantage to one.

For all his troubles, however, a five-stroke cushion will help you stick around to the end, and with a ton of help from the unsettled sand in Bay Hill's bunkers, O'Hair was able to do that. "Not just three plugged lies today, but five of the six he had during the week were plugged," said Tiger's caddie, Steve Williams.

Not just plugged, either, but buried under the front lip, leaving Woods the type of uphill shots that are difficult to carry any considerable distance. The first one, at the fourth hole, was set up by Tiger's worst tee shot of the day and led to a bogey. The last one, at the par-3 17th, came on a 4-iron Woods thought was perfect but landed maybe two yards shorter than it had to fly. It cost him his first lead of the day and sent both men to the 18th at four under.

The middle one, however, sparked the first of two crucial turning points that made Woods' birdie at the 18th the game-winner. "If it hits a foot higher, it lands in the grass," Tiger said of the tee shot at the par-3 14th. "Even if it rolls back, I've still got an easy bunker shot." Instead, Woods got to his ball, cussed his fate, gouged out to 13 feet and hurled the sand wedge at his bag. No doubt, O'Hair was officially in trouble.

One of Tiger's strongest competitive traits is his ability to shift into a higher gear after a bad break, and that's exactly what happened at the 14th. He made the 13-footer, turning what could have been a two-shot swing—O'Hair burned the edge on his birdie try from 15 feet—into a half. Onto the 15th, where he rolled in a 25-footer to finally grab his first share of the lead, then the tough, par-4 16th, where O'Hair made the type of error that often jumps up and bites a man who doesn't win as many tournaments as he should.