KEY POINTS:
You can see it coming - Denzel Washington will play Tiger Woods in the movie of his win at the 2008 US Open - perhaps one of the great wins in any sport; at any time.
The movie will likely start with Woods in the doctor's surgery where
he is given the news, ahead of the US Open, that he should be going into hospital for an operation which would leave him using crutches for weeks.
Washington/Woods looks at the floor, looks at the doctor and his coach, Hank Haney, who has gone to the appointment with him. "I'm playing the US Open," says Denzel/Tiger, "and I'm going to win."
Mark that line. It'll be in the movie, you watch, pretty much as it was delivered by a coldly determined Woods who defied the medicos to notch his best win so far.
Haney said: "Then Tiger started putting on his shoes and told me we're going to go practise. It was just incredible.
"He couldn't walk," Haney said. "Tiger has such an incredible pain tolerance. When he said he was going to play, I knew he was going to play. The thing that concerned me most was, was he going to be able to walk? Was it just going to deteriorate so much that he wasn't going to be able to swing at all?"
News that Woods will now miss the rest of the season after an operation on his left ACL knee joint (not to mention a double stress fracture in his left tibia) has revealed just how much he struggled through the pain and concentration barriers to win one of the toughest majors of all.
Supposed to be on crutches, he crushed the world's top golfers on one leg.
And yet the cynics abound - some of them players, some fans. There are still some who see golf as an old man's sport; an essentially easy stroll between shots where players with protruding paunches can see the ball when they address it but struggle to see their wingtip shoes; a round of golf a mere preliminary to a round of chili dogs, beer and cigars.
Not these days. Woods is renowned for his diet, gym and fitness regime. A new breed of golfers - take a look at the upper body, body shirts and rock star appearance of Colombia's Camilo Villegas, for example - is adopting the same 'better fitness; better results' philosophy.
And maybe some of the cynics should just plain old know better. Like South Africa's Retief Goosen, himself an admirably tough customer, who advanced the theory held by many cynical fans that Woods was faking it during the US Open.
"I think so," Goosen said last week when asked if Woods was exaggerating the severity of the injury, according to a report from the Times. "It just seemed that when he hit a bad shot, his knee was in pain and on his good shots, he wasn't in pain. When he made the putts and he went down on his knees and was shouting, 'Yeah,' his knee wasn't sore. Nobody really knows if he was just showing off or if he was really injured. I believe if he was really injured, he would not have played."
Woods initially tore his ACL while running near his Orlando home following last summer's British Open. He found out about the stress fractures a month ago, as he was attempting to prepare for the Memorial Tournament. They were caused by his rehabilitation from an arthroscopic procedure on the knee two days after The Masters.
When pressed about his comments, Goosen softened his tone, but did not quite retract what he said. "I was being light-hearted," Goosen said, according to the Times. "No one but Tiger himself knows how badly hurt he was. But if he was really badly hurt, he would have withdrawn, wouldn't he?"
This is facile stuff from someone who should know better. Most sportspeople who have played with an injury can tell you that, in moments of pressure or euphoria, sometimes it feels as if the injury is not there. The focus and the adrenalin magically remove the pain, though it usually re-appears with enhanced intensity later.
And this is golf; the head game to end all head games. It is not just a matter of focus - although that is issue enough when playing a major - but also of playing through the pain at a key moment of the golf swing.
Watch Woods when he swings. That clubhead is moving at pretty much 200km/h. His swing is aggressive and requires him to turn his body to gain maximum impact- his knee bearing the brunt of that swing and rotation each time. Plus, because of that remarkable playoff with Rocco Mediate, he played 91 holes of golf in five days.
That means he walked something like 34km, up hills, jolting down into bunkers and holes.
All that time, he never offered his sore knee as an excuse for the double bogeys he hit.
A great win by a great sportsman under great pressure and pain.
