Column: Angel Cabrera smokes Stricker at World Match Play, and Tiger Woods vs. Baddeley was no classic

Chris Baldwin,
Senior Writer

MARANA, Ariz. - Angel Cabrera keeps smoking his cigarettes, sinking his birdies, making his way around the Gallery Golf Club as only he can. If Tiger Woods requires a secret service detail to follow him around courses today, it won't be long before the PGA Tour puts in an environmental cleanup crew in hazmat suits to trail Cabrera tomorrow in this green world gone bonkers.

"Are you worried about your carbon footprint?" I ask Cabrera and he just chuckles and chuckles, his caddie not bothering to translate.

This is who I want going after Tiger Woods down the stretch in match play. Somebody who'd tell Al Gore to stick his carbon footprint up his butt. Somebody who sees those Be Nice To Green signs in his hotel room and still flings the towels on the floor without a twinge of guilt. Somebody who's not so damn polite.

Tiger Woods is 2-for-2 in comebacks against the Courteous Crew in the WGC Accenture Match Play Championship. First, J.B. Holmes on day one - the merry man loser of a three-hole lead with five to play. Then, Aaron Baddeley in round three - the guy who had putts to send Tiger on a Gulfstream run home on three consecutive holes and couldn't hit any of them.

What did Holmes and Baddeley share in common?

When the chance to beat Woods presented itself, they both started playing this desert course with fairways wider than Shaquille O'Neal's ego and rough as fearsome as Miss Teen South Carolina's intellect like it was a U.S. Open course.

"I just told myself not to do anything stupid," Holmes said.

"I didn't want to blow it by going for an opportunity that wasn't there," Baddeley said. "But I wanted to make him win it."

Please do something stupid. For the love of Jack Nicklaus, go for a pin when Tiger least expects it. Who needs to tell these guys that the current pattern is not working? Hello, Bueller? You're trying to close out Tiger Woods on a track that's playing like a glorified pitch-and-putt for the pros.

Heck, drop your pants and run around like your Will Ferrell on acid before you tee off. Do something, anything to shatter the routine.

The most daring thing Baddeley did after Tiger tied him on 16 came in the press conference afterwards when he tried to respin that final-round 80 he put up playing with Tiger at the U.S. Open seven months later. "Honestly, if I hit a couple of putts in the first six holes at Oakmont, it could have been a different story," he said.

That's probably enough to earn Baddeley another Woods whomping somewhere down the road. Hey, Tiger's getting desperate for motivational material these days.

That's the thing. Tiger wants someone to challenge him, to make him raise his game. You can almost hear it in the weary way he describes another victory on a day when he bloodied one marshal with his golf ball.

The gore shot came on 13 - when Woods later admitted he was trying a crazy shot he shouldn't have tried and found skull rather than fairway. After that, Tiger returned to grinding, to waiting for Baddeley to keep playing the game he expected until Tiger could pounce on an opening.

"At the end, I just went back to doing what I do," Woods said, shrugging.

Tiger's conservative is going to beat anyone else's conservative 95 percent of the time. I don't want to hear about Tiger having 11 birdies and Baddeley nine on the day either. Match play birdies are like wedding day jitters. Everyone has them.

As Stuart Appleby explained when people raved over his supposed nine birdies in knocking out Phil Mickelson a day earlier, "It's not like you're putting them all out. If you're putting them out like in stroke play, a lot of them aren't birdies."

Woods and Baddeley turned out to be a good quality match. But it's no classic - 20 holes regardless.

If you walked Gallery Golf Club Friday and thought you were seeing Tiger Woods at his best, you must have raved about Michael Jordan's every 10-for-30 shooting night too.

Baddeley's timid start, timid finish

Baddeley started off as conservative as he finished those last four holes on the greens. He didn't get going until he had a cactus up his butt. Literally. It took hitting one two feet with cactus pins right against his white pants on 5 to awake him to need to go for birdie.

Contrast that with Cabrera who attacked Steve Stricker from the beginning with six match-play birdies in the first nine holes. It left Stricker - such a master of conservative play that he's used it to become the third ranked player in the world, with no chance of challenging Tiger - wondering who changed the rules of the game.

"At one point, I felt like asking him if could bum a smoke," straight-laced Wisconsin boy Steve Stricker deadpanned. "The way he was playing and I was playing, I needed to switch something up."

This is what all-out aggressiveness, a little recklessness can do for you in match play. It looks like Cabrera is just bombing the ball down fairways, using his head only as a nicotine deposit. There's a method to this maverick, though.

"It seems like this format is great for Angel, the way he plays," Stricker said.

Cabrera and his caddy could only laugh at that one later.

"No, no ... I don't know anything about match play," he said as his caddie translated. "I only play it one other time a year and never before I was out here as a pro."

When Stricker finally won his first hole of the match - on No. 14 - he gave himself a mock clap. Cabrera started clapping and laughing with him too. He knew how much he'd gotten in Stricker's head.

Baddeley, on the other hand, played well enough to lose by daring Tiger Woods to do something to beat him in the end.

"I'd rather find out how I'm playing early," Cabrera said on his strategy. "I can't wait to see if I have some shots."

When can we get some more eco terrorists on this tour?

February 23, 2008