By Michael Wilbon
Sunday, July 8, 2007

It might be too much good fortune, not to mention ungracious, for the best player in the world to host his own tournament and at the same time shoot an absurdly low score. A glance at the lake on the edge of the 18th green led someone to ask Tiger Woods later what he was thinking in that moment, and Tiger said, "I was thinking, 'What part of the lake can I throw my putter in?' "

At the same time that he was enjoying the execution of a tournament that speaks to who he is and how golf fits into his bigger view of the world, Woods also was fighting the most basic frustration in golf: missed putts.

Okay, those weren't just missed putts -- they were agonizing misses. Lip-outs, horseshoes, over-the-edge sliders that turned birdies into pars and made even the great Tiger Woods want to throw his putter in the lake at the end of what could have been one of his best rounds ever. We're not talking about sinking 20-footers, we're talking 5 feet, 7 feet, 8 feet, 10 feet.

The thing that would make the inaugural AT&T National truly unforgettable is Tiger going low, way low. Yesterday, Tiger almost went way low. Kevin Stadler, his playing partner, said Tiger missed shooting "62 or 63 by an inch."

Okay, that's an exaggeration. He missed shooting 62 or 63 by a foot. Twelve inches.

Take the distance of six missed birdie putts and it couldn't have been more than that. Could have been less. Even Tiger couldn't dismiss the notion. "I turned a 63 or 64 into a 69 really smoothly," he said. "It could have been a low one."

It started that way, with him making birdie at No. 1, but he missed narrowly on No. 2 and lipped out at Nos. 3 and 4. Tiger found himself thinking, "I should be 3 or 4 under par at number 4," and figured if he kept hitting tee shots and irons that well, and rolling the ball as well as he did the first four holes, putts would start to drop, "which didn't happen," he said.

So instead of being right on the bumper of his good friend Stuart Appleby going into today's final round, Tiger stands at 2 under, seven shots back of the lead. If two of those horseshoes drop, leaving Tiger only five back, it would be okay to start fantasizing. But seven back? Tiger's biggest final-round comeback was seven years ago at Pebble Beach. He was five strokes back at the start of play and seven strokes back with seven holes left, but he finished eagle-birdie-par-birdie and wound up two strokes ahead of Matt Gogel and Vijay Singh.

You'd be goofy to pronounce Woods out of anything because he could play that well again today. Congressional isn't Oakmont set up for the U.S. Open. Tiger had an almost identical third round on Saturday there three weeks ago, when he missed makable birdie putt after birdie putt.

Asked if a six- or seven-shot swing is possible here, Tiger said: "On this golf course? Yeah. You shoot 6 or 7 under par, and [the leader] has one bad day out there."

The real frustration is that it wasn't one of those days when Tiger played well from tee to green and just had no stroke with the putter. "I hit so many good putts that just didn't fall," he said. "It's frustrating, it really is. There's no denying that. When you hit good putts and you think they are looking dead-center . . . then they kind of wander left or right, it is frustrating."

To people elsewhere who are looking at the result of this tournament, Tiger's inability to make putts probably is the story. But that's not the case this week here, where six months ago there was no tournament.

The longer Tiger brings his tournament here and the better he comes to know the area, the more he'll realize metropolitan D.C. isn't a great sports town, but it's an outstanding event town. And tournament golf with Woods in the field is the kind of event metropolitan Washington lives for.

It's a perfect storm, Tiger and Washington and Fourth of July week.

"To have it come together in 116 days is remarkable," Tiger said. "It's never been done . . . not on this scale. And to have the membership here, the golf course, the PGA Tour, AT&T and my staff put it together in such a quick span of time . . . and to have it embraced by the people here in D.C. has been unbelievable. To have some of the troops out this week has been touching to me because, obviously, that's how I grew up. And to have them out there and supporting and watching, it just touches you because I know the commitment that it takes for them to do what they do . . . it is awfully special."

Already, three days in, the AT&T National probably is one of the top 10 stroke-play tournaments on the tour, beneath the four majors, the Players Championship and the World Golf Championships, but right there battling Nicklaus's tournament at the Memorial and Palmer's at Bay Hill. All at once, Tiger gets to honor his late father, Earl, salute American service members, start the process for putting a learning center in metropolitan D.C. and build on his global brand by attracting, easily, the most diverse galleries golf ever has seen in this country.

If he can control the golf ball as well as he did yesterday and shoot, say, 65 today to create the kind of athletic drama we've become accustomed to when he plays his best, fine. If he can't, there's always next week (or the week after) for him, and apparently next year and the year after and the year after that for those of us starving for just the kind of competition, extravaganza and cultural happening that is playing out at Congressional.