Mike Celizic

The story of the final round of the PGA Tournament has a familiar ring to it. Tiger Woods went in with the lead and came out with the trophy, just as he always does.

But if you read that and conclude the final round of the final major of 2007 was just another walk in the sauna for the best golfer the world has seen since Jack Nicklaus, you don’t know what you missed.

When we talk about Woods, and we do that a lot, we talk about the relentless march on Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors. Tiger’s total is up to 13 at the age of 31; the Golden Bear didn’t get to 13 until he was 35. And we talk about how he’s never taken a lead into the final round of a major and failed to win.

But we don’t spend nearly enough time talking about how exciting he manages to make it. For a tournament whose result was supposed to be a foregone conclusion, Sunday at Southern Hills was a rip-roaring good show.

And the reason it was so good was the tenacity of the players chasing Woods and his own ability to rise to the occasion. When he was young and winning majors by double-digit margins, you watched him in open-mouthed awe. Now, you watch him for the same reason you watch a great closer in baseball. You say you know that guy’s a lead-pipe cinch to close the game, but you’re on the edge of your seat when he manages to get two men on and one man out, work the count to 3-2, then get that game-ending double play.

Tiger’s going to blow a lead one day in a major. It’s happened in a regular tournament, and it will happen in one of the big four. That’s the way life is. Sometimes, Mariano Rivera blows a save. And one day Tiger Woods will blow a major.

I’m not sure if he knows that, but I suspect he does. There’s a reason people keep saying golf is a humbling game.

And what makes him such good theater is his ability to keep putting off his inevitable meeting with his own mortality. Sunday was a perfect example of that.

He teed off with a three-stroke lead, and by the eighth hole he’d built it up to five — seemingly insurmountable. But he’d seemed to wrench his left knee — the one that’s been cut on twice — while celebrating a long birdie putt on the eighth hole, and over the next several holes, he wasn’t as sharp as he had been.

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Meanwhile, Ernie Els, who’s won a few majors himself, and Woody Austin, an excitable journeyman who’d spent time after his round Saturday talking about how Woods didn’t intimidate him, were playing terrific golf ahead of Woods. When Woods made a three-putt bogey on the fourteenth hole, his lead was suddenly down to a single stroke.

"I kind of made a mess of it there on 14," he said afterward. "Ernie was playing well, Woody was making a move. I said, ‘Okay, you got yourself in this mess, now go and earn your way out of it.’ " He did that on the next hole, draining a 10-footer for the birdie that reestablished his two-stroke lead — a lead he would keep to the end.

If you play the game, you know just how hard that is to do. Pressure is death to the golf swing, and there’s no pressure like knowing you have to make a shot to get the victory you’ve dreamed about.

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Just because Tiger had won 12 previous majors didn’t make it any easier on the 15th. But his genius is his ability to hit it straighter when it counts the most. Nicklaus was that way. So was Hogan and Bobby Jones.

You see guys like that once in a generation, which is why you have to watch.

Tiger showed often enough that he was capable of hitting lousy shots. But when he really needed to hit it stiff, that’s what he did. And when he absolutely had to roll a 10-footer in the hole, he did that, too.

Yeah, he had the lead and he didn’t lose it, which made the result exactly what everyone said it would be. But it was anything but easy, and, while it was playing out in triple-digit heat, there was no way you could say it was guaranteed.

The man’s a golfing genius, and he showed it Sunday. And in the process, he showed again that he doesn’t have to high-five the spectators and trade one-liners with his playing partner to be the most exciting — and entertaining — man in his, or just about any other, sport.

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