A Real Masterstroke

SAN DIEGO Eat your heart out, Augusta National. The U.S. Open has stolen the Masters' thunder.

The mightiest, most moving roars of the golf season -- those that resound for a true athletic hero, and echo through the decades -- now carry out far over the Pacific Ocean, not through the Georgia pines. This time, it is the month of June that gets to see Tiger Woods, the quintessential swashbuckling kind of champion who prospers at the Masters, turn the often staid par-par-par Open into raw melodrama that will be retold for years.

Get Hootie and the boys a blindfold. Don't let 'em see Tiger -- the long-belting, chance-taking, Snead-Palmer-Ballesteros style of player that the Masters has always helped define -- as he etches his name into another page of U.S. Open history.

Limping, at times badly, in his first tournament after knee surgery, Woods scorched the back nine with two eagles, at the 13th and 18th holes, and holed a one-hop chip for birdie at the 17th hole to take a one-shot lead over Lee Westwood and a two-shot margin over Rocco Mediate after three rounds of this 108th Open.

However, this was no normal Woods charge, and Sunday will probably not be the familiar foregone conclusion for Tiger. On Thursday, he favored his left knee and flinched visibly on a 360-yard drive. On Friday, he tweaked the knee multiple times and was limping, or at least favoring the leg occasionally. But by the final nine Saturday, every heart went out to Woods, for his courage, his amazing gifts, but also for the risks he might be taking by playing hurt so soon after surgery.

After one drive, he buckled so completely that his hand touched the ground, where he pretended to pick up an imaginary tee to hide his pain. After his chip-in birdie, his caddie helped him out of the fringe. And after his final, 30-foot eagle putt had practically caused Torrey Pines to topple into the ocean from the force of the crowd's cheers, Woods told the truth. When did his knee hurt?

"Whenever it decides to act up," he said. And is it, as everyone can see, getting worse each day? "Yes, it is," he said.

All of this sets up a unique -- and utterly different -- kind of final round at an Open. If Woods falters, which no one wants but anybody with good sense can easily imagine, then Torrey Pines is the place for theater that golf may seldom surpass. Usually, in a dark part of our soul, where we gloat at the humiliation of our betters, we cherish Sunday at the U.S. Open, an utterly unique day on our sports calendar. For one afternoon, physical gifts become irrelevant, emotional composure is exposed as mere interior happy talk and the mightiest men of golf are, like the rest of us, reduced to placating vengeful gods whose names we only wish we knew

Now, for one brief Father's Day, all that wonderful torture-chamber entertainment has been changed -- tempered, if not truly eliminated. Here at titanically long but relatively forgiving Torrey Pines, everyone agrees that our national championship is being played on a course that is "hard but fair" with the frequent proviso that the bumpy Poa annua greens are miserably capricious. Only winds off the ocean can make this track a true misery, as was the case for some in Saturday's third round.

But Sunday calls for calm with mere 10-mph breezes. If so, semi-sanity might reign.

As a result, all our expectations for this Open should be significantly altered as we settle back to study the drama. Ironically, at the very time when the roughed-up Masters in April tends to look more and more like the hair-shirt Open, the Open has -- for this one summer -- forsaken the torments of Oakmont and Winged Foot, where 5-over-par has been the winning score the past two years.

Instead, this Open calms the nerves with infinite Pacific vistas as often as its vast greenside gorges inspire thoughts of golficide. For every Phil Mickelson who made a 9 here Saturday on the way to 76, there was a humble straight-hitting Mediate, 45, who found the place perfectly suited to his eye off the tee and managed to shoot 69-71-72 to stand two shots behind Woods.