Bullish Woods receives reality check with a 79
IT was a sair auld fecht. Tiger Woods must have opened his curtains yesterday morning ahead of the third round of the US PGA Championship, gazed at the dreich Tulsa weather and delivered a resigned sigh that could have registered on the Beaufort Scale.
With a body that creaks and groans like an abandoned galleon in a tempest, an early tee-time in the chilly and damp conditions was hardly going to help him. Woods needs warmth for those ailing cranks, pulleys and pistons if he is going to pull off the unthinkable feats that all and sundry still crave. Yesterday provided cold, harsh reality.
After a spirited second-round 69 which dragged him back inside the cut mark on Friday, Woods, in typical bullish fashion, had set his sights on mounting a weekend charge.
One of his playing partners, Rory McIlroy, was just about down on bended knee in reverence.
“He’s incredibly resilient and mentally tough,” McIlroy said of that defiant, determined round. “He’s feeling it on every swing. Looking at him, if that had been me, I would have been considering pulling out and going home. But Tiger is different. He’s proved he’s different. It was just a monumental effort.”
The charge would not materialise, though. Instead, Woods, playing in just his second event this year after that mighty comeback at The Masters, could only muster a painful, hirpling, hobbling retreat. A nine-over 79 – his worst score in this particular Major championship – plunged him down to the foot of the field.
As a dour morning at Southern Hills unfolded, the man with 82 PGA Tour wins to his name became embroiled in a compelling battle to break 80. Woods has posted a score in the 80s just four times as a professional and only twice in a Major.
No other golfer on the planet could command such attention in the midst of such a trial. Webb Simpson, playing a couple of groups ahead of Woods, bounded in with a fine 65 to vault up the order, but his endeavours were effectively relegated to the news in brief as Tiger’s tumultuous tale unravelled. In many ways, Woods remains golf’s blessing and its curse.
He could have been forgiven for a few curses himself during a round strewn with debris. The 46-year-old was one-over through five holes after a trip into the water on the second but another visit to the wet stuff at the par-3 sixth was a grim portent of torrid times ahead.
Woods would rack up a triple-bogey there and then went on to make five bogeys in a row from the ninth. It was the first time he had been on such a ghastly sequence in a Major as a professional. A raking birdie putt on the 15th prompted a sardonic response from Woods and he knocked in a five-footer on the last to make sure he did not venture into the 80s.
“I just didn’t play well,” Woods said in a simple summing up of affairs. “I didn’t hit the ball very well, and got off to not the start I needed to get off to. I thought I hit a good tee shot down two and ended up in the water, and just never really got any kind of momentum on my side.”
As for that bogey-laden stretch between the sixth and 13th? Well, it perhaps should have been played behind a police cordon.
“I couldn’t get off the bogey train there,” he added with a grimace.
Woods was not the only player to struggle. Much younger, fitter men like Jon Rahm (75) Billy Horschel (77) and Sepp Straka (79) all found the going tough.
It was particularly tough for Woods, though. When he hoiked an attempted escape from the sand straight into the face of the bunker, it looked like he would need a Stannah Stairlift to get out of the trap.
“He’s such a phenomenal player, and you feel so sorry for him having to go through this,” said his playing partner, Shaun Norris. “Then again, you also see the type of person he is, that he grinds through everything and he pushes himself through the pain. I think he’ll be back once he gets back to normal health and sorts out his problems.”
Until Woods decides that all of this is not worth the hassle, the golfing world will continue to be engrossed by the various twists in the Tiger tale.