The Old Course at Saint Andrews

If you are just getting out of bed at ten a.m. on this lovely Sunday morning you are probably a. not a fisherman and b. not interested in the Open Championship (commonly mislabeled the British Open). For our first ever installment of Super Sports Sunday I thought I would throw in my two cents on the state of Tiger Woods and the Open Championship. This year the tournament is being held at The Old Course at Saint Andrews one of the most stunning gems in all of golf. If you had to make a list of five course to play before you die St. Andrews, Pebble Beach, and Augusta National would probably all make most people's lists. You can quibble over the other two until the end of time but any of those three would be tough to exclude. Click here for a stunning interactive map of the course being played today for the championship.

Like anyone who claims to know anything about golf, I too will sit down to a perfectly delightful telecast in high definition and be completely distracted by the performance of the great Tiger Woods. Of course, there was a time when we were collectively awe struck by his innate ability to steamroll through any tournament field, wearing his bright red shirts on Sunday and his opponents wilting away like flowers in the desert sun. Currently the winner of 14 major championships sits in 29th place a completely irrelevant 13 shots behind the leader. Jack Nicklaus is the all-time major tournament champion leader with 18 titles and there was also a time when people expected tiger woods to blow through that number en route to a final destination in the neighborhood of 30. Sitting on 14 titles at 34 years old, and going through significant personal, financial, and marital problems Tiger is looking remarkably human. At 34 let me tell you, you start to feel remarkably human.

Maybe Tiger Woods doesn't deserve to make a comeback. Maybe golf like every other sport is starting to pass this particular athlete by. The vast majority of majors are won by golfers under 40. Tiger is of course a special sort of athlete, but an aging special athlete with a gimpy left knee (so I guess we have that in common as well as our age) who is a lot closer to sunset than he is to sunrise. There was definitely a crowd coming into this tournament who was rooting for the man who carries the sport to make a comeback, to win a major on a course on which he excels. Sadly after of Tiger Woods appear to be an automaton who demolished all comers Tiger Woods looks strangely human. Perhaps more amazing than the young robot who won 14 majors will be a curtain call by an aging legend who wins five more. Whatever else I see in sports in my life, I lived through the eras of Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky and I lived through the era of Tiger Woods.