Time for Tiger Woods to throw in the towel?

UNIVERSITY PLACE, Wash. — After covering American Pharoah's Triple Crown triumph, it was time to consider where that event ranked among the best things I've covered in 28 years as a sportswriter.

It belonged on a short list that includes the 2013 Iron Bowl, the 1992 Duke-Kentucky game, Michael Phelps' eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympics – and three golf tournaments won by Tiger Woods.

I walked nearly every hole of his ultimate masterpiece, the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach that he won by 15 shots. Walked nearly every hole of his spellbinding duel with Bob May later that year in the PGA at Valhalla. And I walked all 91 holes of his profile in grit – the 2008 U.S. Open triumph on a broken leg.

If three of the seven best things I've ever covered involve Tiger Woods, you can guess how I feel about watching him play. Which is why Thursday's walk with Tiger at Chambers Bay was supremely awful.

The walks used to be magic. Now they are morose.

Tiger walked 18 more holes here Friday, shooting a less humiliating but still futile 76, missing the U.S. Open cut by a mile. There was no climbing out of the Thursday crater, no reaching back to locate some latent brilliance and salvage another tournament gone very wrong.

The most memorable thing about Woods' Friday round was on his first hole of the day. After yanking his second shot into the hay on the side of a hill, he climbed up to the ball and promptly slipped and fell on his backside. That was all the metaphor anyone needed.

Watching an athlete who is a stumbling, bumbling shell of his former greatness is no fun. It's sad. It's a reminder that time is undefeated – for all of us, even legends we would love to watch forever.

Older folks remember Willie Mays staggering through the twilight of his baseball career, a stylish centerfielder who turned into a creaky relic incapable of catching routine fly balls. The great Dave Kindred, covering this event for Golf Digest, remembers the end of Muhammad Ali's career in much the same way.

"Helpless," Kindred told me Friday morning in the Chambers Bay media tent. "That's the word that comes to mind."

[Slideshow: Round 2 of the U.S. Open]

Kindred covered 17 of Ali's championship fights – covered him at the peak of his spellbinding powers. He also was there for the dispiriting beatdown from Larry Holmes in 1980 that should have signaled the end – but didn't.

"Even Ali didn't realize the end," Kindred said. "He had to have one more fight."

That fight was in the Bahamas a year later against Trevor Berbick. Kindred remembers that there wasn't even a proper bell to ring between rounds, hitting a cowbell with a hammer instead. In a sad career coda, Ali lost that bout in depressing fashion.

"The great ones always think they're going to be great," Kindred said. "They make us think they're going to be great. Ali was like that, and with Tiger it's kind of the same thing. You keep thinking, 'He's going to be there. Any minute, he's going to be Tiger again.'

"Then you see him just flailing. And you want it to stop."

You want it to stop.

The more modern pugilistic parallel to Woods is Mike Tyson. The two shared a similar intimidating quality – an innate intensity that seemed to literally scare the fight out of some opponents.

Then Buster Douglas shockingly knocked the invincibility out of Tyson, and a fire hydrant did the same to Woods – and that special quality simply vanished. They're just not the same without that mental edge. You could almost see doubt creeping in and tearing down their fortress walls.

Tyson quickly withered as a fighter. Woods seems to have done the same as a golfer. He isn't just fading now – he's collapsing. Swing changes – his explanation for every ghastly round – shouldn't render an all-time great completely uncompetitive. (He beat exactly four of 156 golfers in this tournament.)

A competitor who once seemed impervious to the crushing pressure of championship golf now seems profoundly affected by it. He thrived in the cauldron of do-or-die competition against May at Valhalla and against Rocco Mediate at Torrey Pines. Now he rarely rises to the big occasion – his final-round 74 while in contention in the 2013 British Open at Muirfield may have been Woods backing out of the last major he'll have a great chance of winning.

I walked that 18 with Woods, too – both of us listening to the roars up ahead as Phil Mickelson seized the championship. Since then the walks have only gotten worse. He'll be 40 years old in December, a difficult time to recapture lost athletic glory.

"He did not know that it was already behind him," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the main character in "The Great Gatsby." The same could be said of Tiger Woods.

There is no retracing the steps of Pebble Beach, Valhalla and Torrey Pines. The path back to that time is gone.