⏩ Tiger Woods: Despite past success at Harding Park, chilly weather might dampen chances to thrive.
Tiger Woods was bundled up for his news conference Tuesday morning at Harding Park. Summer weather in San Francisco had made its presence felt — foggy, chilly (high 50s), bleak.
Put another way: Not at all like most of the country in August, and not especially helpful for Woods and his chronically troublesome back.
Two days ahead of the PGA Championship, he acknowledged it’s more challenging to get loose, and stay loose, amid these conditions.
“When it’s cooler like this, I just need to make sure my core stays warm, layer up properly,” Woods said. “I know I won’t have the same range of motion as I would back home in Florida, where it’s 95 every day. That’s just the way it is.”
Woods was not planning to play a practice round Tuesday, preferring to spend time on the range after playing all 18 holes Sunday and the front nine Monday. His back didn’t seem to bother him Monday, especially on No. 4 — he crushed his tee shot around the corner on the doglegleft par5, which measures more than 600 yards.
Woods has abundant history at Harding Park, where he won a World Golf Championship event in 2005 and went 50 in the Presidents Cup four years later. But that was Woods in his prime, relatively healthy and utterly dominant.
Now, at 44, his creaky back prevents him from playing all that often. Woods made only two starts in the first 21⁄2 months of the year, before the pandemic shut down play, and he has made just one start (tie for 40th at the Memorial) in the eight weeks since the PGA Tour’s restart.
So Woods brings zero momentum into this major.
“Obviously, I haven’t played much competitively, but I’ve been playing a lot at home,” he said. “… This is what I’ve been gearing up for. We’ve got a lot of big events starting from here, so I’m looking forward to it. This is going to be a fun test for all of us.”
Among other topics Woods covered in his pretournament session with reporters:
⏩ On Harding: “The big holes are big and the shorter holes are small. It can be misleading. They’ve pinched in the fairways a little bit and the rough is thick and lush. With this marine layer here and the way it’s going to be the rest of the week, the rough is only going to get thicker. So it’s going to put a premium on getting the ball in play.”
⏩ On the electric atmosphere when he beat John Daly at Harding in ’05: “You couldn’t have put two of the more, I guess, crowddrawing people together in a playoff. So it was loud. The people were into it. It was a lot of fun. I still look back on it. I just didn’t want it to end the way it ended in that playoff (when Daly missed a 3foot putt). The way we were playing, we should have continued. It was just an unfortunate way to end it.”
⏩ On the legacy of fellow Stanford alum Sandy Tatum, who orchestrated Harding’s renovation: “I knew Sandy before I even entered college, because I played in the U.S. Junior up here at Lake Merced when I was 14. Got a chance to meet Sandy then and knew the process when I was in college of what he was trying to do here. He is the one who singlehandedly turned this golf course into what it is now.”