A Slam By Any Name

Tiger Woods makes history

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By Dan Jenkins

Photo By Ed Acuna

June 2001

It’s 2005 in Augusta, and Tiger Woods is out of contention to win his fifth straight Masters and Grand Slam because he hasn’t been able to play any practice rounds—his young wife has made him go to the mall every day to look at ceramic tile and wall covering.

Tiger admits he’s had no luck in getting his wife to read my helpful book on marriage: Men Are From Carpet, Women Are From Hardwood Floors. He explains that she’s still too busy exchanging the wedding-gift crystal that came in the wrong pattern.

He also arrived in town with a sprained shoulder from helping his lovely young wife, the former Miss Barbara Valerie Palmer, move a 10-piece sectional sofa to the other end of the living room to see if it might look better down by the fireplace.

Plus, Tiger hasn’t enjoyed a good night’s sleep all week, since he’s been up with their newborn triplets, Ben, Byron and Sam. What all this means is that either Phil Mickelson or David Duval will finally win a major after all these years.

OK, enough of that. Let’s talk about reality. What to make of Tiger and this Slam thing?

When last seen in the press emporium at the Augusta National on the evening of Sunday, April 8, sportswriters from around the globe were feverishly hammering away on their machines to come up with a suitable name for Tiger’s awesome achievement of holding all four professional majors at the same time, even if it took another calendar year to do it.

Actually, we’d been working on it all week, long before Tiger would prove his mastery yet again, and long before Mickelson and Duval would do their anticipated pratfalls in the 2001 Masters.

The best efforts seemed to be:

Phi Granda Slamma, Thai Slamma Granda, the Tiger Slam, the Fiscal Slam, the Bum Slam, 4 for the Road, the Major Sweep, the Mulligan Slam.

Personally, I leaned toward the Mulligan Slam, inasmuch as it took Tiger two attempts—last year and this year—to win the Masters and complete the deal. Made sense.

But then I strained two muscles in my back and broke a leg off a chair to come up with The Woods Wins Quartet.

Only history can decide if my Woods Wins Quartet will scale the heights of the Impregnable Quadrilateral that some scribe attached to Bobby Jones’ feat in 1930, back when men were men and some were amateurs and they all played golf in shirts and neckties.

WHERE THIS SLAM RANKS

This is no attempt to belittle what Tiger did. It surely ranks among the five greatest accomplishments in golf. But right now it’s sort of difficult to rank it ahead of Jones’ same-year Grand Slam of 1930, Ben Hogan’s Triple Crown in ’53 (and five out of six wins for the year), Byron Nelson’s streak of 11 victories in a row in ’45, which was really 12 in a row unofficially, or Jack Nicklaus’ steady scooping up of 20 major championships over a career, spanning four decades.

I will certainly yield those treasures if Tiger wins the year’s final three majors to make it a true Grand Slam, seven in a row, as in seven tricks in the game of bridge, from where the term originally leaped to land on Bobby Jones and O.B. Keeler and Grantland Rice. That crowd.

Who’s to stop him? The majorless Mickelson? The majorless Duval? Perhaps, but it’ll more likely be the law of averages, a destiny thing, a twist of fate. Maybe someday a Jack Fleck-type guy like Chris DiMarco, the Florida Gators’ hope—“I try not to think too much when I’m playing,” he said—who benefited from the slowest greens in years at Augusta to glue himself to the leader board for three days but one year will refuse to evaporate, as he did eventually.

Or Argentina’s double-wide, Angel Cabrera, The Poorly Dressed Bull of the Pampas. He drives it so far he frequently doesn’t know what to do next, but he tied for 10th, very nice, and left some of us thinking that Cabrera’s sounds like a good name for a restaurant chain.