TIGER TAUNTED BY FATHER TIME
Creaking Woods plays through pain
TIGER WOODS last night admitted that Father Time has caught up with him after an agonising first round of 78. The three- time Open champion revealed that he had been hampered by his repeated back surgery and was heading for immediate treatment, but Woods, 43, said he expected to play through the pain today.
‘I’m sore, I’m sore,’ he said. ‘It’s just the way it is — Father Time and some procedures I’ve had over the years.
‘It’s the way it’s going to be. I’m not 24 any more. Life changes. Life moves on. And I can’t devote the time to practise like I used to. Standing on the range, hitting balls for four or five hours, go play 36, come back, run four or five miles and then go to the gym. Those days are gone.
‘I’m just not moving as well as I’d like. And, unfortunately, you’ve got to be able to move and, especially in these conditions, shape the golf ball. And I didn’t do that. I didn’t shape it at all. Everything was left-to-right. And I wasn’t hitting very solidly.
‘As I said, one of the reasons why I’m playing fewer tournaments this year is that I can hopefully prolong my career.’
Woods’s round — his worst at an Open for 17 years — included one birdie, six bogeys and a double bogey. He is 12 shots off the lead and a long way from his sporting miracle of winning the Masters in April.
This was only his 11th round since that sunlit day in Augusta as he ekes out the last of his brilliance.
The futility of Woods’s challenge yesterday was evident the moment a grimace broke across his face as his very first shot headed left and into the rough. Still, the big galleries that hollered for him hoped he might bend fate again and perform like his old self, despite preparations that were hardly worthy of the name. Would the old
Tiger, the one who set about devouring Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors, have spent a nice family holiday in Thailand, mid-season? Or talked down his chances before a ball was struck? Never and never.
He walked the course like a man in need of WD40. He bent to pick up the ball so deliberately at times, you wondered whether he might get stuck there, like a grandfather reaching for the remote.
He grumbled his displeasure at how he was not purring like the engine he once was. He winced and we winced.
His round, which had spluttered from the start, went truly awry with a bogey at the fifth and then came a double bogey at the sixth. We were into a horror show and one framed by the worst the capricious conditions could throw at him.
Fat, icy drops rained horizontally up there on the seventh tee, high and exposed to the Atlantic Ocean. And, by his own admission, cold weather is no friend of his eroded body.
‘Playing at this elite level, you’ve got to be spot on,’ he said. ‘There are too many guys who are playing well and I’m just not one of them.’
Woods, who turns 44 in December, was encouraged with the usual ‘Come on Tiger’ calls but he was in no mood for niceties.
Asked by a member of the crowd next to whose feet he was playing his second shot at that storm-tossed seventh, ‘What’s it like?’, he could not bear to answer that his well-travelled ball was on another unintended detour towards the TV cables.
He simply thrust his club back at his bag. That summed it up.