Woods' game falls apart as his Cup demons reappear

Tiger Woods isn't playing golf here, at least not the kind that has shaped his life – and his expectations – since his toddling days. No, he is experiencing something like travail, and with the added pain that the desperately extended birthpangs have little prospect of a happy ending.

Even a bouncing baby of Ryder Cup success would, it seems clear enough now, bring little joy to his heart. He would, all the evidence of his body language says, shoo it away into the margins of his existence. With a bit of luck it might never re-appear.

Before yesterday he made it plain he didn't like this week-long celebration of the golfing intangibles: ésprit de corps, sentiment, albeit scarcely skin-deep and mawkishly exaggerated, and the possibility that there is something more to the game than the relentless grinding out of victory over four days of stroke-play.

Now dislike may be turning into something more profound. After fourball and foursome defeats by Darren Clarke and Thomas Bjorn, Lee Westwood and Sergio Garcia yesterday, by 1 up and 2 and 1, Woods had a record which would give most run-of-the-mill golfers cold shakes in the night: three wins, eight defeats and a half.

As Westwood, whose career has been in freefall since he beat Woods in the company of Clarke at Brookline Country Club three years ago, drilled in a series of birdies yesterday afternoon, the Tiger's putter fell apart.

On the eleventh he missed the kind of routine 10-footer that he would knock in quite formally on the last day at Augusta. Then he failed from little more than three feet. He looked up to the slate grey heavens and found no relief. On the 17th green, after fighting his way out of a bunker, he putted from 20 feet to preserve his life and that of his partner Mark Calcaveccia. But the reprieve lasted only for as long as it took Wedgewood to tap in the clinching birdie.

All the coup de grace lacked was a blindfold and a cigarette. As early as the first hole of the first action of a day that was supposed to put the Europeans in chains, Woods' distaste for the old tournament suggested it might be edging towards full-blown paranoia.

He heard the click of a camera on the backswing of his second shot which landed some way from where he intended, short and left. He yelled to the crowd, "Not on my backswing," and was received by a sea of blank faces. At the Open in July a similar incident ended with a haplessly guilty Japanese cameraman being roughly bundled off the course.

Here there was no readily available culprit. Did anyone else hear the offending noise? There were no volunteers and the Tiger's playing partner Paul Azinger took the position of Basil Fawlty when he ordered his staff not to mention the war within earshot of their German guests.

Explained Azinger: "I never asked him about it. I think someone snapped a camera, I'm not one hundred per cent sure. I didn't want him to dwell on it beyond that instant. A lot of times that happens to you early it can be in the back of your mind on every shot that it could happen on your downswing. It's a distraction. You don't want that to happen, and I didn't want to bring it up. I didn't ask him what happened."

Maybe it was the supervisor of the unit of demons who attach themselves to Woods the moment the Ryder Cup appears on the golfing horizon who clicked the camera. Perhaps it was the mere presence of the world's number one which over the day filled such recently notorious under-achievers as Clarke and Westwood with such dramatically revived spirit. Whatever the reason, these unhappy coincidents further ravaged a Woods' record which is becoming nothing less than a chart of disaster.

Bjorn saw off Woods and Azinger with a beautifully controlled 20-foot putt on the 18th green, and through gritted teeth the Tiger showed a degree of grace.

Said Woods: "It was disappointing we lost because we really played well today. And to shoot that low and end up losing the match is a little disappointing, especially when you birdied the last two holes. We sucked it up and we got it done. They played great. They got up and made a lot of putts. Thomas played beautifully on the last nine. I think he shot about 5-under par on the back nine so he really played well. It came down to a matter of making as many birdies as we possibly could, and it just wasn't enough."

As early as the fourth hole, after Clarke, maybe buoyed by his memory of beating Woods in a World Matchplay final, surged to three straight birdies, Azinger had a sense that whatever he and the Tiger did it wouldn't be quite enough. "I turned to Tiger," Azinger reported, "and said, 'Are they going to birdie every hole?' But we didn't talk too much about how things were going. We pretty much tried to mind our own business and do what we needed to do. In the end you just had to shrug your shoulders say, 'we did great, but they played better.'"

Azinger agreed that part of Woods' Ryder Cup problem was the degree of resistance he faces from players who know that over the course of four days in a major championship they would have little chance of mastering the range and the depth of the Tiger's game. There is also the relentless matter of Tiger-proofing which, Azinger argues has reached new levels here at the Belfry – including the wrecking of the the 10th as potentially the world's greatest matchplay hole.

He said, "I don't really know what happened in Spain in 1997 – I wasn't there – but I believe the golf course was set up there to neutralise our power as a team because we were much bigger hitters. In Brookline I think Tiger was neutralised a little bit. Here, there's nothing he can do. We have some powerful hitters that are forced to hit irons off every tee. Tiger hit drivers off both par-5s. He's hitting into a very small area – the guy is forced to play back. His strength is his power. And, yes, in the Ryder Cup his opponents do get up for him. If I played him I would be be so jacked up to go head-to-head. Are you kidding? It would be great."

For Woods the prospect can be rather less inspiring. There is too much chance in the Ryder Cup, he has said, and too much opportunity for an assassin to come at him, get him, and steal away without the ordeal of a longer examination – the kind Woods likes to conduct on the last day of a major.

There is another problem. It surfaced when he made his first appearance in Sotogrande five years ago. His friend and mentor Mark O'Meara was one of those demanding a closer inspection of the Ryder Cup profits. That was categorised as greed in some areas but Woods had a sense that his sudden fame was being used.

"The problem with Tiger at the Ryder Cup," said a compatriot yesterday, "is that he is told to do it for the glory of his country. Then he gets up to the first tee, looks around and sees 50 corporate tents. You've got to figure that it is quite a big factor. Where else but the Ryder Cup do you see Tiger Woods miss two short putts inside 20 minutes?"

Last night there was no more haunting question in all of golf.