What Tiger knew then was something the numbers would reveal afterward as well. Though he three-putted only once, Woods still ended up ranked 41st on the greens. The crispness with which he was striking the ball, Woods knew, was matched by how uneasy he felt all weekend standing over putts on Oakmont’s slick surfaces.

A questioner hadn’t even finished asking “Are these the hardest ...” before Woods cut him off.

“Without a doubt,” he replied. “You say Augusta is hard, yeah, but they have flat spots where they put the pins.”

“The putts I had that I knew I could make — left-to-right, right-to-left, uphill — I powered them in there,” Woods said. “But I had so many breaking putts that it was hard to keep my speed and line, and I kept worrying about my pace and make sure I didn’t have a second putt.”

True as that was, the explanation was also a bit too neat.

At No. 3, Woods bladed a chip shot from behind the green, chunked the one after that and made 6, his only double-bogey of the tournament. At No. 13, he missed a 6-footer for birdie, one of the rare times Woods hasn’t holed a putt he absolutely had to have. At No. 14, pumped up and hitting wedge, he flew the flag and had to settle for the fourth of eight straight closing pars.

The shot that stuck most vividly in his memory, though, was a bunker shot at 17. When he dug his feet into the sand, he was 6-over and Cabrera was in the clubhouse one stroke better.

Slide show Oakmont images View photographs from the 2007 U.S. Open in Pennsylvania.

“I hit a nice bunker shot, too,” Woods recalled, “but unfortunately when I hit it, I could tell it caught a rock on my wedge. And I heard a ’cling,’ you know? And when it came out, I was hoping, ’Please, still have the spin on it that I felt.’

“But it didn’t,” he added. “It released on through.”

Woods made just three birdies in the final two rounds, just one in the last 32 holes. Not even Tiger Woods can always fly past the obstacles that trip up the rest of us, find the missing piece of the puzzle or simply forge a new one. Sometimes life is just that hard.

So welcome to our world, Tiger, if only for one day.

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