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      Lee Westwood and His Decades of Success

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesBritain’s Vaccine RolloutVaccine TrackerFAQ: Vaccines and MoreAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLee Westwood and His Decades of SuccessUsually a slow starter, he began 2020 by winning the first tournament he played.Lee Westwood, right, celebrated with James Baker, his caddie, after winning the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship tournament in January.Credit…Kamran Jebreili/Associated PressDec. 9, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETAn admitted slow starter, Lee Westwood was as surprised as anyone when at age 46 he won the first tournament of the year on the European Tour, the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. It made him the only active player on the tour to have won in four different decades.“Historically I’ve been the type of player who had to play his way into form,” he said. “I threw that out of the window in winning the first event. It just surprised me.”Within two months of that hot start, the strangest year in golf began. The Covid-19 pandemic shut down the main golf tours for months. When professional golf resumed in the spring, it surged in popularity, as one of the few live sports on television.But the pandemic made the travel necessary to be at the top of the international game tough. And Westwood’s career has been a global one. Including his 25 victories on the European Tour, Westwood has 44 worldwide wins, with 12 in Asia, three in South Africa, two in the United States and one in Australia. In more than 800 tournaments on the two major tours, the PGA and the European, he has made the cut more than 80 percent of the time.And going into this week’s DP World Tour Championship, Dubai, he is ranked fourth in points in the Race to Dubai, the yearlong points race to determine the best player on the European Tour.The following interview has been edited and condensed.In addition to winning the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, your play at the majors has been solid. You had a great start at the Masters this year, tied for 13th at the United States Open and tied for fourth at the last British Open. What do you attribute that continued strong play?I’m just still keen to work. It’s putting in the hard work that leads up to the tournament. Everyone gets excited to play in a tournament. I think people lose the drive to get to that point. I’m still fit and strong. It’s not like I’ve lost my length. When you look at it analytically, there’s no reason I shouldn’t play well. I have experience on my side. Majors take a slightly different approach. You have to think your way around the golf course a little bit more. Par means a lot more. For me at a U.S. Open or Open Championship, it’s plotting your way around a golf course. It plays into my game.Westwood on the eighth hole of The RSM Classic at the Seaside Course at Sea Island Golf Club in November.Credit…Sam Greenwood/Getty ImagesYou’ve been a global player for decades. What was traveling for tournaments like this year?Well, it was dictated by the pandemic. We were in lockdown March, April and May. Up until September, I didn’t feel comfortable going too far. I went to Europe, and I didn’t fancy going too far until I got a picture of how things were. The U.S. Open [at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y.] was the first time I went over to the States. When your job is traveling through all these time zones, that really goes out the window.How important is playing around the world to a player’s development?You become much more well-rounded as a person. You need to play on different courses, different grasses, different greens. It can be part of your development as a player. At the end of the day, what people want to see is the top players playing together more often in the same tournaments. It’s all right seeing everyone play in the States. That’s where the cash is. But I think we should have tournaments in Australia, South Africa, South America where all the great players come together. The pandemic has shown that golf isn’t broken. It doesn’t need fixing. It just needs sharing around the world.Your 2020 season is ending in Dubai, with seven tournaments in the United States and 14 on the European Tour. How would you sum up this year for you and other global players?It’s very difficult to sit back and do an appraisal of it. There were five months off in the middle of it where I just sat around, really. Then I played a lot in Europe, not too successfully. I played well in the U.S. Open. It’s been a weird one. One of the good things that came out of it is I lost 12 kilos [about 26 pounds]. I’ll be fitter going into next season. I’ll take a month off after Dubai and start again in Abu Dhabi.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tiger Woods Faced Disaster at the Masters. He Stuck Through It Anyway.

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      AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods had just birdied three holes on Sunday at the Masters when he stood at the tee box at No. 18. A few of the men sitting around the 17th green did not bother to watch.This was no charge toward a sixth green jacket. It was the last act of a Sunday unlike any other in Woods’s quarter-century around the Augusta National Golf Club: He shot 76, equal to his worst round at any Masters. Yet that score was a far greater achievement than it, or his tie for 38th place at one under par, would suggest.“This sport is awfully lonely sometimes,” said Woods, who entered the tournament as its defending champion. “You have to fight it. No one is going to bring you off the mound or call in a sub. You have to fight through it. That’s what makes this game so unique and so difficult mentally.”Few figures in the game could have pushed on quite like Woods, who appeared intent on salvaging something even if few people were watching. He birdied five of the final six holes and parred the other — a better late showing than the new champion, Dustin Johnson, who finished at 20 under. Summoning the experience that he has judged particularly vital at the Masters, Woods somehow assembled the type of performance that ordinarily would have had the grounds swelling into roars.But it came only after an indisputably calamitous turn at No. 12, the very hole that Woods used as a springboard to his Masters victory just last year.Resplendent in his ritual Sunday red, he strode to the hole, a par-3 around Rae’s Creek made even more dazzling this year by the soft colors of autumn after the coronavirus pandemic forced a postponement of the traditional April major. He had another tournament’s worth of earned confidence, having made par there in his first two rounds and birdie on Saturday.Swing. Plop. The ball rolled into the water.“The wind was off the right for the first two guys, and then when I stepped up there, it switched to howling off the left,” Woods said. “I didn’t commit to the wind, and I also got ahead of it and pushed it, too, because I thought the wind would come more off the right and it was off the left, and that just started the problem from there.”“From there,” he added, “I hit a lot more shots and had a lot more experiences there in Rae’s Creek.”From the drop zone: Swing. Hit the green. Roll backward into the water.Again from the drop zone: The ball stayed dry, but it landed in a back bunker. Then, with Woods’s legs forming part of a quadrilateral over the sand, he hit over the flagstick and into the water. He tried again from the bunker and finally reached the green safely.A putt just missed. Then, at last, technically a 10th stroke to a conclusion somewhere between merciful and wrenching. He evacuated the hole with a 56 on the day and his worst score on any single hole during his career on the PGA Tour. His gallery, already vastly diminished because of Augusta National’s pandemic precautions, fled, too.“He had a bit of a disaster on that hole, didn’t he?” said Shane Lowry, who was in Woods’s group. “Look, this is what Augusta is when the wind is up like this. It’s a pity we’re not out there for the full day in this because it would have been a nice chance for some people to shoot good scores and move really far up the leaderboards.”Woods certainly tried. But there is only so much to do on the last six holes when, even at the start of the day and before the torment at the hole known as Golden Bell, Woods needed the greatest comeback in Masters history if he was to keep his green jacket for another year.The observers thinned out more. Woods plodded on, invisible on almost all of the scoreboards around the course. No matter.Birdie. Par. Birdie. Birdie. Birdie.Then to No. 18, the place that has seen champions go awash in glory. He peered down the 465-yard hole, the last test of a tournament lost.He drove it to the middle of the fairway, well right of the second bunker. Then came a push onto the green. A nifty putt for birdie earned claps but nothing like a roar.A reporter asked afterward about his motivation — about whether he worried, at age 44 and with a career of triumph, pain and scrutiny, that it might fade away sometime.“No matter how hard I try, things just don’t work the way they used to, and no matter how much I push and ask of this body, it just doesn’t work at times,” Woods said. “Yes, it is more difficult than others to be motivated at times.”But there he had been on Sunday at Augusta, pushing to the finish, assessing the past, talking about the future. Later, he emerged to present the green jacket to Johnson.On this Sunday, at least, it was someone else’s turn. More