Tiger Woods' mental game is also unmatched

But that's not how Tiger Woods played it. He knocked his drive into the right rough, the ball diving into a thick patch of grass atop the lip of a fairway bunker. It was the third round of the 2000 U.S. Open, and Woods seemed to be in trouble up over his ankles.

As far as defining moments go, what happened next was a dictionary's worth, not only for the history of the U.S. Open, but also for Woods and his legacy.

From this position, the normal play would be to dry your sweaty hands and chop the ball back onto the fairway. Woods doesn't play the normal way. Standing 210 yards from the flagstick, he grabbed a seven-iron, took the blind angle over the trees and the cliff, and smacked the ball onto the green 10 feet from the hole.

The results were immediate . . . two-putt birdie, lead grows, game over.

Woods wound up winning that U.S. Open, his first, by 15 shots, which broke the previous best margin in a major championship by two strokes. That record had been around for a while, but only if you consider 138 years a long time, or since 1862 when Old Tom Morris won the British Open at Prestwick.

We know now that Woods plows through record books with alarming ease, thanks to an undeniable skill level that's unmatched in this era. If playing great were all that Woods is about, that would probably be plenty, but there's another quality even more important than skill.

It's his mind, and that very well could be his greatest weapon.

Woods didn't invent mental toughness in golf, not with the hard-boiled megastars who passed this way before and went by the names of Hagen, Jones, Sarazen, Snead, Hogan, Nicklaus, Palmer and Watson. But there is no one better who is now playing golf.

When the U.S. Open starts this week at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, we will see many players who can drive the ball 300 yards and drop a seven-iron close to the pin.

But can they do it when the pressure is the greatest, when the lights are on, when the intimidation factor of a major championship scares the air right out of your lungs?

With trophies of his 13 major titles in his den at home in Florida, Woods owns the evidence that he can handle it, probably better than anyone else . . . maybe ever.

"Tiger," Jack Nicklaus said, "is a world apart."