Tiger says he’s in a good place heading into PGA Championship

ing into that PGA,” Woods said, “and hopefully, I can put it together this week.”

They were encouraging words, not quite to the level he shared about a few past majors. Woods said that only three times in the 15 majors he won did he realize “all I had to do was keep my heartbeat going and I was going to win.”

One was his 12-shot victory in the 1997 Masters. The others were his 15-shot win at Pebble Beach in 2000 and his eight-shot win at St. Andrews in 2000.

“My game was clicking on all cylinders for maybe the week prior. The week of it, got a little bit better and just had to maintain it the rest of the week,” he said. “Those were the rare exceptions.”

He can't predict how his surgically repaired back will feel tomorrow, much less for an entire week. And he hasn't competed enough lately to get a true sense of how he will perform.

Woods just knows it will be quiet. This is the first major without spectators. The atmosphere is nothing new for players who have been back at work for the last two months on the fan-free PGA Tour. The stakes are higher now with a major, no matter how silent it might be.

“The atmosphere will not be the same, and I can say from experience," Jon Rahm said. "You're coming down the stretch and you're hitting some shots and you don't know what's going on, you don't know what the people in front of you are doing. And you're hitting shots into the green and you don't know how close they can be. It's very odd down the stretch.”

It wasn't anything like that when Woods won at Harding Park in 2005, beating John Daly in a World Golf Championship that felt like a rock concert with two of the biggest draws in golf — one predictable, the other not so much — in a playoff. It was so loud that Woods recalled being halfdeaf from the screaming.

And now there are only silent expectations, for him and many others.

For the second straight year, Koepka comes to Northern California with a chance to win the same major three years in a row, a feat achieved by only six players in the 160-year history of the majors. He was runner-up at Pebble Beach last summer in the U.S. Open. Now he's the two-time defending champion for the PGA, and he found some form last week with a runner-up finish in a World Golf Championship.