Tiger Woods was at some kind of a Nike corporate outing recently, entertaining executives and various other rich people. There was a question and answer session, and most people asked questions about their swings… until some guy got up and said, “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior? And if not, prayfully, would you?”

The room fell silent in response to the holy roller. But Tiger, as he always is, was unflappable. His response:

“My father was a Christian – of course Christianity was part of my life – but my mother is Asian and Buddhism was also part of my childhood, so I practice both faiths respectfully.”

Very smooth… didn’t even break stride. Here’s a short list of how some other athletes may have responded. Feel free to add your own…

Rasheed Wallace: “Aw, fuck you.”

Ben Roethlisberger: “Ah… no, not really. You guys probably know this, but I’m invincible. I don’t need a helmet to play football, I damn sure don’t need one to ride a motorcycle, and I once played a football game with a temperature of 137, so I don’t really need a savior. But don’t get me wrong, Jesus is cool. Tell him to call me if he needs to know how to throw a tighter spiral. I’ll even autograph a Fathead for him.”

Terrell Owens: “Hell yeah. I tried to go see him last week.”

Darrell Jackson: “Yeah, you know, I like Jesus. Me and Jesus cool, ‘n stuff like dat. He’s my savior, and I go to chuch ‘n stuff like dat.”

Shawn Green: No. No I don’t.

Carl Everett: Jesus? As my savior? I’m not even sure that brother existed, alright, so fuck him. Fuck Jesus, and fuck dinosaurs.”

Kurt Warner: “Well, you asked the right guy. Everyone get comfortable. We’re gonna be here for a while.”

Allen Iverson: We sittin’ here… I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we talkin’ about Jesus. Not God. Not God… not God. We talkin’ about Jesus. What are we talkin’ ’bout? Jesus? We talkin’ about Jesus, man. We talkin’ about Jesus. We ain’t talkin’ about God. We talkin’ about Jesus.

Joe Theismann: Absolutely, I do. Jesus was a guy who went out there every Sunday and just got the job done. Until they nailed him to that cross, and then he lost a little bit of effectiveness in his deep ball. So what I’m saying is no, no I don’t.

Mark Cuban: I actually just signed Jesus to a seven-year, $115 million deal. He’ll be backing up Dirk Nowitzki.

Lamar Thomas: “Me and Jesus are cool, but Jesus better not come in to the OB playin’ that stuff. You can’t let him come in here with his apostles and start talkin’ that noise. I’ll get on that elevator and go down there and beat his ass myself.”

What bothers me most about the continual Ryder Cup ass-poundings is not the fact that we keep getting embarrassed… it’s that we never have an answer for it. Tom Lehman can’t explain it, Tiger Woods can’t explain it, and Phil Mickelson for damn sure can’t explain anything.

We keep getting our asses kicked, in our soil, on their soil, when we’re favored, when we’re the underdogs… and no one can ever explain why.

Two theories I’m discounting are that we don’t care as much, or that we don’t want it as much. There’s just no way that’s true. Maybe there are certain individuals who don’t care a lot (and I don’t believe Tiger Woods is one of them, despite that finger always being pointed at him), but there’s no way I’m believing that this isn’t as vitally important to our guys as it as theirs. The way our players talk about it, the way they prepare themselves, the measures they’ve gone to… there’s too much evidence that this is very important to the our side.

And maybe that’s a part of the problem. You never hear about the European team taking a trip together to bond (as the Americans did in Ireland), because they don’t have to. You don’t hear about their coach’s strategy for putting together teams, you don’t see them sweating every little detail… they show up, slap some teams together, play golf, and take their trophy home. We don’t.

I’ll believe that the European team is a little more tightly-knit to begin with, that they like each other, are comfortable with each other, and enjoy spending time with each other. I’ll buy that as a theory. When they travel to American tournaments (which is way more frequent than American golfers traveling to European tournaments), a lot of them stay together, they hang out, they practice together… they like each other. They’re comfortable with each other. That probably makes a big difference.

Other than that… I couldn’t tell you. The European team just goes out and hits better shots. There’s a reason for that somewhere, but no one seems to know what the hell it is. Maybe the Europeans have some kind of a strategy or gameplan that they protect as well as Colonel Sanders protects his chicken recipe. I don’t know.

Or, and this is a theory that I like… maybe we just need to leave Phil Mickelson behind. Ol’ FIGJAM was the worst player in the event (Brett Wetterich gets a pass, because nothing was expected out of him, mainly because he’s Brett Wetterich), getting only ½ of a point in five tries, which puts him at 1-9-1 in his last 11 Ryder Cup matches.

The team selection process will almost certainly be reworked, and that’s fine. But I don’t think we need fewer captain’s selections, I think we need more. And I think we need two optional “captain’s deselections,” where the captain can choose to take someone in the Top 10 in the point standings, and tell them to stay the fuck home. I am looking at you, Phil Mickelson. I hate your insincere smile, no one else on tour likes you, and you suck at being part of a team.

Here’s the breakdown of the American team:

…because Tiger Woods is quickly proving every other human being alive to be obsolete. He won the Douche-a-Bag Championship yesterday by two strokes over Vijay Singh. And Vijay played well. He was just up against Tiger, which meant that he just didn’t have a chance in hell.

Tiger wasn’t even leading heading into the final round this time. He trailed Vijay by three strokes heading into the day, and he came out and said, “Well, I’m going to come out on Monday, and I’m going to shoot a 29 on the front, and the rest of you can suck me off. How’s that sound to everyone? Good plan? Okay, good. The line forms to the left.”

Five golf tournaments in a row. With all the good golfers in the world right now, and just given the very nature of golf, where it’s hard to play great for any extended period of time… this is incredible. The record, in case you’re wondering, is a staggering 11 straight victories, set by Byron Nelson back in 1945. And Tiger, as awesome as he is, isn’t touching that one. That may be the most untouchable record in sports.

You could argue, though, that Tiger’s 5 is nearly as impressive as Nelson’s 11. It’s impossible to compare eras, but the fields Tiger faces week in, week out, are exponentially deeper than anything that existed in 1945. It’s not even close.

If you’re another golfer on the tour … exactly what are you going to do? You can make a perfectly good living by playing for Tiger’s table scraps, if you want to. But if your self-esteem depends on being the best, then you’re sorta screwed. The PGA Tour right now is full of guys who just have to content by play for second place.

It’s hard to overstate Tiger Woods’ greatness at the moment. He’s just running through people. I thought today might be the Sunday when he’s got someone or two challenging him. The course was playing pretty easy and there were a lot of guys in contention. But it didn’t happen, because Tiger is Tiger, and no one else is.

I love watching him. I actually find him exciting to watch, and he’s a fucking golfer. Physically, he’s better than anyone else, but the reason I love watching him is his incredible focus. It’s complete tunnel vision, and it is unshakable. I think it’s the most impressive thing going in sports today. I realize that this is highly subjective, but I find it more impressive than LeBron’s ability to control an NBA game, more impressive than David Ortiz’s clutch hitting, more impressive than Kobayashi’s cast iron stomach, more impressive than anything else out there.

I believe that if he was lining up a putt on 18, even if he already had the tournament won, and didn’t need the putt… if he saw Manute Bol having sex with his wife on top of a baby-oil-covered Twister mat, with a jockey riding Manute and slapping him with a whip, while KISS played an impromptu concert right behind them… he wouldn’t blink. He’d see it, he’d notice it, but right then, he wouldn’t give a fuck. What’s important is the putt. Nothing else. The putt is the thing. He’ll make it, sign his scorecard, collect his trophy, do an interview with Peter Kostis, and then he’ll beat Manute Bol’s ass. Or join in.

But anyway, going back to the inability to overstate the man’s greatness… Wilbon puts him in the Ali/Jordan category today. And, you know… it’s not ridiculous. I’m not saying I agree, I’d need some more time to think about it. But it’s not ridiculous.

By the way, why we’re here… Wilbon also takes Sergio Garcia out to the woodshed for giving this reason for Tiger’s domination: “The bad shots he hit all week long, he got away with them.”

Puss. Bag.

You know, it’s amazing that no one else got those breaks. Out of all the players in the field, Tiger must’ve been the only one getting good breaks. Hopefully, Sergio Garcia can someday get those breaks so he can actually, you know, win something. A guy known more for yellow pants than championship golf should probably keep his mouth shut. The only thing he should be thinking is that he just got his ass whooped, and he needs to get better if he wants to win. The fact that that thought even occured to him is evidence that he’s a skirtbag.

Okay, I made that up, and Dave Pelz does not, to my knowledge, abuse PCP or any other narcotic. He doesn’t need them, because his own view of reality is distorted in ways that you and I can’t even imagine.

He told a reporter that “when Phil’s at his best, nobody can beat him.” The reporter asked if that included Tiger Woods, and he said, “You bet it does.” He continued:

“Phil’s short game is the best in the world. He doesn’t have a serious weakness inside 150 yards. Phil putts more consistently than Tiger does. He has more imagination and a few more shots around the green.”

He then resumed smoking that sherm.

I mean, I understand, he’s Phil’s coach, he wants to build his confidence, maybe give Phil a challenge. But it’s been proven, time and time again, that you do not want to trash talk Tiger Woods right before you play with him. You don’t even say anything that could maybe possibly be construed as trash talk. I’m not saying that he should walk around and just be intimidated by Tiger’s very presence, but facts are facts. If you lob something at Tiger that could be considered as disrespect, he will use it as motivation to bury you. It’s what he does.

I’m not talking, necessarily, about his near-flawless final round of 67 to wrap up the British Open. It was what happened immediately afterwards that I’ll remember.

If you were lucky enough to be watching, here’s what you saw: Tiger taps in for birdie, then hugs his caddie Steve Williams. Williams is ready to release the hug, but Tiger’s just getting started. He begins sobbing uncontrollably into Stevie’s shoulder, and can’t stop. Eventually, he lets go, finds his wife, and cries some more. And not just a few tears; it’s deep, belly crying. The emotion is just pouring from him.

And then two minutes later, he’s doing an interview with ABC, and it’s the same old Tiger. Calm and cool as ever, just perfectly normal, his voice didn’t waver a bit. He went back onto the green, remembered Chris DiMarco’s mother, talked about his own father, and not another tear came. Not one.

It was like, “Click, boom, emotions are now shut off.” When all was clear, he allowed himself a moment of vulnerability, and then it was immediately back to Tiger mode. I don’t know how he goes from heavy sobbing one minute, to not even look like he had cried the next.

I was amazed by this. Absolutely amazed. And I don’t think it’s at all coincidental to why Tiger Woods is so great at what he does. He is in control of himself, perhaps more than anyone else in sports. Both Nick Faldo and Paul Azinger expressed amazement about how Tiger was able to keep it together during the Claret Jug presentation.

It makes me believe that if he can keep it together through that situation, something so extremely emotional, that there is no chance in hell that any competitor, golf course, or situation that he faces will ever make him lose focus. Mentally, he’s damn near invincible.

Phil Mickelson, meanwhile, will remember the British Open for a very different reason: the really hard pin positions.

“The pin positions were very challenging – that would be putting it nice,” said the Masters champion.

When asked whether they were bordering on the unfair, the left-hander said: “That is not my call but they were very difficult.”

Pussbag. It’s one thing if you’re playing at a sun-baked U.S. Open course, where the greens are like concrete, and +4 is leading the tournament. It’s quite another when the leader is -18, there are 46 players under par, 7 players in double digits under par, and the winning score is just one off of the lowest British Open score in recorded history.

I’m not doubting that the pin positions were difficult, but 21 players managed to find a way to deal with them better than Phil did, including such luminaries as Greg Owen, Brett Rumford, Robert Rock, and Mikko Ilonen.

I’ve only heard one guy complaining about the course this week. Now, I’ve heard a lot of people saying it was a thinking-golfer’s course, that it required some forethought and course management skills. Perhaps ol’ FIGJAM didn’t bring those things to the table with him this week.

I have no idea why this guy is so popular.

The British Open gets underway at some ungodly hour this morning. Hell, they might be playing right now. And I think it shapes up as one of the more compelling major tournaments in recent memory, at least in the pre-tournament build up. Storylines abound. You’ve got Tiger, still dealing with the loss of his father, having played poorly at the last major, but well in recent weeks. And there’s Phil Mickelson, fresh off of his debacle at the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open. And I suppose it’s something of a big deal that Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo (who is kind of awesome) are paired together for Thursday and Friday.

They’re not the best of pals, Woods and Faldo. Tiger Woods, you see, is Jordan-like in his ability to carry a grudge, over even the slightest of slights. Faldo, as a commentator for ABC, once criticized Woods for a poor shot he hit, and then critiqued his swing. Tiger didn’t like it, nor does he like Nick Faldo. They haven’t spoken since then. It could be a frosty first 36 holes between them. A British bookie is offering 6-4 odds that they won’t shake hands on the first tee, and though it started at 100-to-1, the odds that they two end up in a fistfight currently stand at 25-1. 1,000,000-to-1 seems a little more realistic to me. Tiger might be ultracompetitive and not that friendly, but a fighter, I’m guessing, he is not. If they did come to blows, I might lay a few bucks down on Faldo beating his ass.

Also on the subject of Tiger, he couldn’t find comfortable lodging in the Liverpool area this week, so he’ll be confining himself to Michael Owen’s mansion (pictured above). I thank my brother for the link. Owen, star British soccer player, is currently in the States getting his knee worked on. He heard somehow that Tiger didn’t have a suitable play to say, so he called him up and made the offer. A very sweet gesture. I hope Owen’s got some kind of hidden camera system in there that he plans to use to catch Tiger and Elin doing it.

As for the actual tournament… if I take the PTI question of Tiger vs. The Field, I’m taking Tiger. The course sets up well for him, the rough isn’t all that heavy, and if the winds stay down, he’ll just overpower the thing. I think he could end up winning it by five strokes.