Perfect 10 as Tiger goes for the jug-ular

IT all ended at 4.40pm on a muggy St Andrews afternoon although there were still an hour and twenty five minutes of golf to be played.

At precisely the same time that Tiger Woods was making birdie at the 12th, his chief rivals Jose-Maria Olazabal was taking bogey at the same hole and Colin Montgomerie was doing likewise at the 13th.

That left Tiger at 14 under and Olly and Monty both on ten under. There was no way back for either. It turned into an anti-climactic end to an otherwise magnificent championship as Tiger had the claret jug in the bag. He eventually cruised home by five strokes, adding a 70 to his earlier scores of 66, 67 and 70 for a fourteen under par total of 274.

Tiger’s sense of delight would be impossible to measure. Asked what one of the world’s richest sportsmen would do with his prize of stg£720,000 (1,047,362), he quipped: “Put it in the bank.”

“Are you saving up for anything?”

“Yeah, a rainy day.”

Nothing could curb the pleasure he took from capturing his tenth major championship victory (and what they call the double grand slam) that leaves him eight behind Jack Nicklaus and one adrift of Walter Hagen.

Having won the Masters at Augusta in April and finished runner-up behind Michael Campbell in the US Open, who would bet against him further cutting the gap between himself and Nicklaus when the US PGA Championship takes place at Baltusrol, New Jersey, next month.

Five years ago at St Andrews, Woods had eight shots to spare over his nearest rivals; this time it was five. In between, there were moments when it appeared that he was no longer the game’s dominant force. That’s when he decided to change his swing, switching coaches from Butch Harmon to Hank Haney and last night he wasn’t for sparing those who knocked him and even predicted he’d never win again.

“That’s why I bust my butt so hard at home to get to this point,” he said. “I’ve been criticised for the last couple of years. Why would I change my game? This is why. First, second and first in the last three majors, that’s why. I’m so excited to have my best ball striking rounds when I need them most. At Augusta, I messed up in the end but in the play-off, I hit my two best shots of the entire week. At the US Open, I hit it well all four days, just didn’t putt well. This week I putted great.”

Watching this latest triumph were his mother, Kutilda, his lovely blonde Swedish wife Elin and her extended family. His dad, Errol, is seriously ill at home but Tiger insists he is “stubborn and fighting hard.”

And, as Montgomerie noted, Tiger now has the Jack Nicklaus record very much in his sights.

“It is a dream come true for me to join Jack as those who have won the Open in the modern era at The Home of Golf,” he said. “I hit it really well out there today and had great control of my golf ball. There was pressure on me when Olly and Monty got to within a stroke of me with early birdies, but I was patient and the birdie at the 5th was very important.”

Certainly, the Spaniard and the Scotsman looked to be well in the hunt over those opening holes but even then the deadly, unremitting accuracy of Woods’s long game and the precision of his iron play and putting was always going to overpower them.

He wasn’t bragging or exaggerating when he commented that “I hit only one bad shot today, my second to the 13th which I pulled about ten feet.” He smiled broadly at this, satisfied that if this was the worst he had done over an Old Course playing hard, fast and unpredictable, then he had little to worry about.

“I have never warmed up as well as I did on the range this morning and I just carried that on to the golf course,” he enthused. “I flushed it all day. It was one of those rounds I’ll be thinking of for a long time. As for the tenth major, it’s pretty cool to have kind of gone one past Jack’s record. When I started the Tour, I didn’t think I’d have this many majors before the age of thirty. No one ever has. Usually a golfer’s golden years are in their 30s.”

One of the most graphic examples of the exemplary shotmaking Tiger was talking about came at the 7th. He picked the ball perfectly off the baked St Andrews turf, the ball bounced once on the green and crashed against the flagstick before rolling back and off the putting surface.

He got down in two from there, of course, and even though he missed a couple of really short birdie putts on eight and nine, never looked in the slightest trouble. But there was also the St Andrews factor. He was a red hot favourite from the outset, not least because this links looks like it might have been created for him.

“There are some courses you just feel comfortable on and this is certainly one of them,” he explained. “I fell in love with it the first time I came here when I played every single hole into the wind. I enjoy the lines here. Guys say the lines fit. These certainly do. I may hit bad golf shots, I certainly did this week, but I feel very comfortable here. The greenkeeper told us that the fairways are rolling just as fast as the greens. The only difference is the greens are softer and not by much. This course plays very hard, very fast and we didn’t get a big wind so I think it still stands up as a true major championship test.”

Graeme McDowell was best of the Irish, tied for 11th on six under. He shot a best of the day 67, a great achievement because it was none other than Tiger himself who insisted that “it blew early this morning and the guys out then had a much harder course than we had in the afternoon. We certainly got the best side of it.”