Friday column: Competitive drive vs. perspective

Phil Mickelson was excited.

Kenny Perry was gracious.

Tiger Woods was pissed.

All of which helps explain their relative positions in the golf universe.

After a brilliant front nine Sunday at Augusta, Mickelson frittered away his opportunity to complete a comeback for the ages and win the Masters.

First, he put a ball into the water on 12. Then he missed a 4-foot eagle putt on 15. Then he blew a 5-foot birdie putt at 17.

Yet he was smiling when he came off 18.

“It was fun,” he said.

Perry, 48, bidding to make history as the oldest man to win a major, took a two-stroke lead with him to 17, only to bogey it and 18 to fall into a playoff, which he lost.

“I’m still proud,” he said, before going on to warmly praise the man who beat him, Angel Cabrera.

Woods started the day — like Mickelson — seven strokes back. He, too, made a run at the lead — only to bogey the final two holes.

“I was just terrible,” Woods told a TV interviewer, anger evident in word, tone and body language. “I don’t know what was going on. It was just frustrating.”

Then he stalked off, smileless, joyless.

Woods isn’t into fun. He isn’t into moral victories. He’s into winning — period. His hyper-competitiveness is one of the reasons he’s so good.

No one becomes a successful pro athlete without being competitive — and Mickelson is quite successful; Perry, too, for that matter. But Woods’ competitiveness is of a different order. He doesn’t just love to win — he absolutely hates to lose.

When I’m rooting for an athlete, I prefer he or she be steely eyed. But in real life — and no, sports isn’t real life — it’s a little more complicated. In a February column about CEOs who helped lead us into recession, Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post noted, “many of the men who have lost other people’s money describe themselves as sportsmen, and operate with an absolute win-loss mentality.”

Wrote Jenkins: “Edward Bennett Williams called it ‘contest living,’ the unrelieved striving in which ‘every effort is marked down at the end as a win or a loss.’

But in real life, not everything is a clear win or a clear loss. In real life, results are often mixed, and their ultimate legacy has a lot to do with how they’re viewed.
This is how Perry viewed the Masters:

“I will look at this as a special week. It wasn’t perfect, but I’ll go home tonight with my family and we’ll have fun.”

There’s a word for that — perspective. I don’t know that that helps Perry in sport, but I’m quite certain it does in life — real life.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.