A Masters Clash?

By Robert Sullivan/Duluth, Ga.

This week the two greatest golfers in the world, David Duval, 27, and Tiger Woods, 23, will play in the Masters, the greatest of golf tournaments. It offers the tantalizing possibility of a head-to-head shoot-out between two of the game's rocket launchers, and the kind of Jack Nicklaus vs. Arnold Palmer face-off that can make golf absolutely riveting television. Alas, there are eight dozen more golfers in the field. Let's hope they don't get in the way.

You know Tiger, of course. When he won his green jacket in '97--crushing the course and the competition with a 12-stroke margin of victory--he set off a golf boomlet. But this year Woods comes careering through the gates with dented fenders and wheels coming off. Tiger's been losing his temper and his putting stroke. He shed his agent, and he bagged his caddy, the cuddly Fluff Cowan. He does have one Tour win this season and a number of high finishes. By human standards, he's playing well.

That may not be well enough to handle Duval, a quiet man given the nickname "Rock" who rolls into Augusta, Ga., having recently won a minor major, The Players Championship, against a tougher field than he'll face at Augusta. That victory punctuated an altogether astonishing 18-month run of golf. Late in the season of Tigermania, Duval won his first-ever PGA tournament. He won the next week too, and then the next. "We knew [that] once David got going, he'd win a bunch," Davis Love III said last week. "But we never expected a roll like this. You wonder where it's going to end." Or if. The roll has included 10 victories in 33 starts, and record winnings last year of $2.6 million.

Duval's win at TPC last week had an overarching specialness in that it came on the same afternoon as his golf-pro dad's first win on the Senior Tour. His relationship with his father Bob has had its ups and downs, all of them traceable to late 1980, when David's elder brother Brent was found to have a rare blood disorder, aplastic anemia. David donated bone marrow, but Brent died soon after of graft-vs.-host disease. Nine-year-old David wondered if he had contributed to his brother's death and became a subdued, serious child.

Bob Duval was the pro at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville, Fla., and the golf course became David's refuge. It would not shield him then, nor could it later, when his parents divorced, finally, in 1996. But things have since improved. Duval has reconciled with his father, while his mother has fought her way back from depression. Duval's longtime girlfriend, Julie McArthur, has said it can't be coincidental that David's breakthrough in golf arrived as he and his family achieved a certain stasis.

Although Duval declines to join in that psychoanalysis, he will say he is more at ease than he was two years ago. You'd never know it by looking at him; those windshield goggles and a pulled-down cap seem to shout, "Go away!" Yet Duval has many friends on tour, some of whom use the word sweet to describe him. Any gutsy kid who approaches Duval for an autograph will get an autograph. "Being a good role model, conducting myself as a professional, acting like a gentleman when playing"--these are responsibilities Duval welcomes rather than shuns. And he welcomes being the favorite going into the Masters. Why shouldn't he, asks Bob Tway: "He's playing the best of anyone, his confidence level has to be ridiculously high, and the golf course fits him perfectly."

It fits Tiger's game too. Every year the lords of Augusta tinker with something, and this year they've gone to town, adding trees and moving tees in an effort to "Tigerproof" the course, or at least make it tougher for big hitters. Now, for instance, only the mightiest will reach the par-five second hole in two shots.

But that tinkering could work in favor of blasters like Duval. On Sunday all the big guns will still be going for the green in two on both the par-five 13th and 15th holes, and that will be thrilling to watch, especially if Tiger and Rock are involved. "I hope it comes to pass," says Duval of a rivalry with Woods. "I think it would be good fun. I appreciate the desire for such a thing. I am certainly not going to sit here and downplay it, or fluff it off."

That's a slip of the tongue, not a dig. But if you're trying to build a rivalry, you can take it however you like.