Tiger changes shirt and luck after horrid start at PGA NO SWEAT!
ST. LOUIS —The shot was simply awful. One that the Tiger Woods of a decade ago rarely suffered.
On his second hole in the first round of the PGA Championship on Thursday, Woods so badly chunked an approach shot from the rough that it came up a good 15 yards short of the green.
“Stuck in the ground,” Woods would later explain.
Splash went his ball into the water, and just like that, Woods made double bogey. After an opening bogey, he was 3 over par in his first two holes at Bellerive Country Club.
A murmur of disappointment went through the gallery. It looked like Woods, winless in his last 27 majors, was out of the tournament before 9 a.m. local time on the first day.
Woods stubbornly didn’t let that happen.
Dripping with sweat, he ran into a portable toilet and changed his shirt.
Joked caddie Joe LaCava, “That one wasn’t working.”
“Normally, I change before the round,” Woods said. “There wasn’t a place to change on the 10th tee.”
Possibly drifting into the toomuch-information category, Woods said, “I sweat a lot, and I lose a bunch of weight. No matter what I eat, no matter what I drink, I just can’t maintain weight. So this heat is one of the issues that I have.”
His luck also changed. He produced two tremendous par saves, birdied his ninth and 10th holes, and made only one bogey over the last 16 holes to score an even-par 70 that put him tied for 48th, six shots off the pace of leader Gary Woodland.
“I could have easily gone the other way, being 3 over through two,” Woods said. “A lot of things could happen — not a lot of them were positive. But I hung in there and turned it around.”
After starting on the 10th tee, Woods trailed the early leaders by six shots after eight holes, and it could have been worse.
Following the double, he hit a great iron shot on 12 to 2 feet for birdie, and recorded two par saves — at 15 (two hooks into the trees) and 17 (a woefully short approach into a bunker).
Then came two straight birdies. Woods eschewed his driver for a fairway wood at 18, and the layup to 183 yards must have been a good number, because he striped his 7-iron approach to 4 feet.
At No. 1, Woods had 147 yards to the flagstick, put his approach to 10 feet and made the putt to scramble back to 1 over.
He made a final birdie at the par-5 eighth, blasting a 70-foot bunker shot to 8 feet.