Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 149 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today’s excerpt is from The Majors by John Feinstein. It is one of those Feinstein books that follows something for an entire year. This book revolves around the four major golf tournaments in 1998. The following passage is an exchange between two golfers during the Masters. You may recognize one of the golfers.
Haas had hit a good drive, but he was a good 50 yards back of Woods. He hit a full three-wood and was still 90 yards short of the green. Woods also took out a three-wood, an almost impossible shot given the narrow landing area short of the green. He hit the ball pin high.
“You take a full swing at that?” Haas asked as they walked up the fairway.
“Nah, I choked down on it,” Woods said. The two monumental shots seemed to have calmed him down. They had awed Haas. “Those two shots,” he said, “cannot be hit by a mere mortal.”
Haas was beating the kid by nine shots and still found his ability mind-boggling. Woods birdied the eighth to creep back to three over and then birdied the ninth. “What struck me about Tiger that day was as angry as he was walking to the eighth tee, he didn’t blow up and he didn’t give up,” Haas said. “The mark of a champion isn’t how you play when everything is going right, it’s how you play when you’re struggling. He showed me something that day.”
Put today’s entry into a baseball context.
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