Tiger returns
The Memorial brings Tiger Woods out of hibernation.
Now after five weeks of absurdly good golfers making absurdly good shots in front of absurdly few onlookers, here comes the one for whom the fresh hush of the PGA Tour might feel the strangest.
That would be Tiger Woods, whose entire career since 1992 at Riviera in Los Angeles at age 16 has been a case of hubbub, decade after decade of throngs after throngs clogging courses.
“Well, even in college I had a few people following,” Woods said from the Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio, the stage for his weirdest return to Tour visibility.
He figures he has not had a round resembling what he will experience this week since, well, the 2012 AT&T National at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. That’s when a rainstorm left fairways strewn with branches and ropes savaged by fallen trees. Tour officials decided that the third round should occur spectator-less, so, that when Woods chipped in on No. 6, for example, Doug Ferguson of The Associated Press made an unofficial count of the various observers and got to 73.
Woods shot 67 that day (and won the tournament the next), and Brendon de Jonge, the former Virginia Tech player who usually would have had a healthy Hokie contingent, said, “I think we had three [spectators] today. Maybe four for a couple holes, but then he left us.”
That third round, Woods said this week, “was the quietest round I’ve ever been involved with in a tournament setting. That’s what the guys are saying now, that it’s a very different world out here, not to have the distractions, the noise, the excitement, the energy, the people that the fans bring. It’s just a silent and different world.”
So it has been the past five weeks, as the PGA Tour has reopened after a cancellation-strewn, 91-day hiatus with low scores and nearzero spectators in events won by Daniel Berger (in a playoff over Collin Morikawa), Webb Simpson, Dustin Johnson (including a 61 Saturday at the Travelers in Connecticut), Bryson DeChambeau and Morikawa (in a playoff against Justin Thomas).
All that while, Woods has followed by TV or computer at home in Florida, unseen since Riviera in February except for an exhibition in May. He said he has been playing golf at Medalist in nearby Hobe Sound, playing more tennis than ever, reading Dean Koontz books and watching carefully such events as the MorikawaThomas playoff this past Sunday in the first of consecutive events at the Memorial course.
On that first playoff hole, Thomas, 27, made a putt from way downtown, after which the 23-year-old Morikawa made one from merely downtown to stay afloat, his equation altered from the norm by the lack of any Thomas-stoked roar that, Woods surmised, would have made things “a lot more difficult.”
“So to see J.T. make that putt, he’s screaming, but no one else is screaming,” said Woods, the Memorial winner in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2009 and 2012. “And then when Collin makes it, normally — he didn’t have that much of a reaction, but the whole hillside on 18 would have just erupted. I’ve been there when they’re throwing drinks toward the greens and people screaming, highfiving, people running around, running through bunkers. That’s all gone. That’s our new reality that we’re facing …
“But it’s so different not having the energy of the crowd, and for me watching at home as a spectator and one that has played this golf course and have heard the energy that the fans bring to these holes and these situations, not to have that is very different, very stark really.”
Woods suggested that age can matter, and three of the first five winners in the hushed format have been 27 or younger.
“For some of the younger guys it’s not probably not particularly different,” he said. “They’re not too far removed from college or they’ve only been out there for a year or two, but, for some of the older guys, it’s very eye-opening really. It was more watching golf to see how it is now, see what our near-future, our reality is and our foreseeable future is going to be.”