By Bob Markus

Tiger Woods wasn't just beaten in Sunday's PGA championship final round--he was Shanghaied. No, there were no British press gangs lurking at Hazeltine, hoping to send the four-time PGA champion on a slow boat to China--unless you count the British newshounds sent to cover the British Isles contingent, i.e. Padraig Harrington, Rory McIlroy, Lee Westwood et al, who played prominent roles in the tournament. The days are long gone when unsuspecting landlubbers who were indiscreet enough to visit the waterfront late at night risked being impressed into duty on an English ship.

In this instance the term "Shanghaied" takes on new meaning. You see, this wasn't the first time North Korea's Y.E. (for Yong-Eun) Yang bested the world's best golfer in a tournament. Nearly three years ago, in November of 2006, Yang won something called the HSBC Champions in Shanghai, China. He won the tournament by two strokes over runners-up Tiger Woods and Retief Goosen. So, on Sunday, Woods was "Shanghaied" again. By whatever name you want to call it, Sunday's stunning result was the most heart-breaking loss of Woods' career. It wasn't just that it was the first time Woods had ever lost a major when leading going into the final round. He had been 14 for 14, but, after all, nobody's perfect. It wasn't just that a 15th major had slipped from his grasp. At 33 he still has plenty of time to win the four more that will tie him with Jack Nicklaus for the all-time lead. That he will win more majors is a virtual certainty. That he will win another PGA is not. There are four major championships a year, four chances to edge closer to his goal. But only one chance each year to win his fifth PGA title, which would tie him for the alltime lead with Nicklaus and Walter Hagen.

Yang, who had but one previous PGA Tour victory, deserves all the credit for doing what no one else has ever done--overtake Tiger Woods in the final round of a major tournament. But Woods contributed greatly to his own demise. His medium range putting, usually impeccable, was, in a word, horrendous. It started on the final hole of the third round the previous day when Woods, leading by two strokes, appeared ready to make it a more comfortable three. He had a birdie putt of under 10 feet, the kind he usually gobbles down like a python swallowing a toad, but this time it stuck in his throat. So, when he lined up a nine-foot putt on the first hole Sunday I said to myself, "if he makes this he's going to run away with this tournament. But if he misses. . . ." He missed and Yang was still only two shots behind and never got farther behind than that. With five holes to play the two were tied and this was the moment Yang was supposed to crack. Instead he hit two magnificent shots over the final five holes, the chip shot for eagle on the short par four 14th, the shot that ultimately won the tournament, and the three iron over the trees from 210 yards out on the 18th, the shot that sapped the last of Woods' iron will. Thus Yang became the first Asian male golfer to win a major, although Woods himself has more Asian blood (50 per cent) running through his veins than African-American (25 per cent). You can bet that there will be more and more Asians coming to the PGA tour. If you doubt it, just look at the women's tour where there are so many Asians--mainly Korean--winning championships that tour officials considered making speaking English mandatory for LPGA tour membership.

The victory by the 37-year-old Yang, who did not take up golf until he was 19 (compared with Tiger, who seemingly started playing in the womb), is being hailed as the greatest upset in golfing history if not the biggest upset in all of sports. Perhaps so. But if Jack Fleck's 1955 U.S. Open victory over Ben Hogan does not top it, at least it runs a very close second. Fleck was, essentially, a club pro from Davenport, Iowa, who, at the behest of some of his golfing buddies, started playing some of the winter tour events, mainly to escape the bitter midwestern winters. He had only been playing fulltime on the PGA circuit for about a year when he qualified for the 1955 Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. Hogan at the time was as revered and respected as Woods is today. He was looking to become the first man to win five U.S. Open titles and appeared to have it in his pocket when he left the 72d green with a par and a one-shot lead over some guy named Fleck. So sure was Hogan that he had won the tournament that he flipped his ball to an official and said, "this is for the Golf House (museum)." NBC, which covered only the final hour of the tournament, went off the air saying that Hogan had won his fifth Open. Bantam Ben was sitting in the clubhouse, sipping a glass of Scotch, when Fleck lofted a seven iron over a bunker and landed it eight feet from the pin. Then he sank the birdie putt, tying Hogan for the lead and setting up an 18-hole playoff for the next day.

It was a foregone conclusion that the battle-tested Hogan, the greatest golfer of his era, and some still say the greatest of any era, would dust off the upstart Fleck as easily as an elephant stomping on a mouse. But Fleck won the playoff 72-69 and nobody yet has won a fifth U.S. Open. Tiger Woods has three of them among his 14 majors and if anyone is going to win five, he's the man. Unless he gets Shanghaied again by some golfer who is unknown, unsung, and unimpressed with going toe-to-toe with the world's greatest golfer.