Woods opts out; agony too much
TULSA, Okla. — Agony, always a threat to turn up and howl as Tiger Woods returns from the car crash and surgery maze of early 2021, played its most prominent role to date on a chilly Saturday at Southern Hills. Soon, the whole exercise of playing golf looked very much like agony.
With a triple bogey on the menacing par-3 No. 6 epitomizing the woe, Woods ended up having his 79th round in the PGA Championship become his 79th best, with a score of 79 after he fended off an 80 with a gutty five-foot par putt on No. 18.
The PGA of America announced later Woods withdrew from the PGA Championship, the first time he has ever withdrew from a major.
In the gruel of it all, on a course with more than its share of undulations, simple acts such as bending over, exiting bunkers or just plain walking looked like an agonizing minuet of winces and limps, even more so than last month at the Masters, where he returned from his hiatus after his car crash of February 2021 and shot a 78 on a Saturday similar in weather to this Saturday.
At the Masters, he shot 71-74-78-78.
Here, he has shot 74-6979.
The scorecard groaned right along with him and with his thousands of supportive witnesses Saturday, with bogeys on Nos. 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. It left him 12 over par for the tournament after the achievement of making the cut for the second straight major on one rebuilt lower right leg.
It came just hours after the relatively calm warmth of Friday late afternoon, when players plucked the course for gaudy scores that included Bubba Watson's 63. Woods shot a 1under 69 that soared given the circumstances, and he wound up looking at least partway to exhilarated.
Only his birdie at No. 15 with a 36-footer lent thrills to the thick galleries at Southern Hills on a morning and midday otherwise hard to watch, especially from close by. “You know, he's such a phenomenal player,” said playing partner Shaun Norris, the South African ranked 68th in the world, who shot a 74.
“You feel so sorry for him having to go through this. But then again, you also see the type of person that he is, that he grinds through everything and pushes himself, even all the pain and that. It's not easy to see a guy like him have to go through that and struggle like that. He's swinging it nicely, and I think he'll be back once he gets back to normal health and sorts out all the problems.”
Norris said: “He's always been an unbelievable putter, but there were a few times he hit some irons and I thought: ‘He's there. It's there. I mean, it's definitely there.' I think it's just the fatigue and the pain at the end of the round that catches up to him at the moment.”
Woods has spoken often this spring of the behindscenes drudgery of getting him ready to emerge onto the golf course and play 18 holes. He referred to himself Friday as “Humpty Dumpty,” his “team” rebuilding him each night. He has stressed the pain of it all will limit him to only a handful of large events, mostly majors.
Yet he balked at the idea his 79 owed that much to the quick turnaround from finishing Friday evening to playing Saturday morning.
“Well, it's not bad,” he said of that factor. “I just didn't play well. 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 2 and ended up in the water and just never really got any kind of momentum on my side.”
Then: “I couldn't get off the bogey train there . . . . As I said, I just didn't — I didn't do anything right. I didn't hit many good shots. Consequently, I ended up with a pretty high score.”