Shoots 4-over in the opening round
There are good days and bad, and this was somewhere in between. What bothered him more was being in reasonable position off the tee on all but three holes and not being able to score.
And it was clear early that would be an issue.
He tugged a wedge into a lie so buried in the sand left of the 12th green — his third hole of the round — that he could only blast it out away from the flag. It kept rolling into a bunker on the other side, and he had to get up-and-down for bogey.
After a two-putt birdie on the 13th, his round fell apart.
Woods tried to hit a flat 9iron on the par-3 14th, the signature hole at Liberty National with a view of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline behind her. He pulled it over the flag, over the green and into a 5-foot ditch.
He took a penalty drop and faced a flop shot to a green that ran away from him, and he left that in the high grass. That led to double bogey. Unable to reach the green from a fairway bunker on the next hole, he made another bogey. After a beautiful pitch into the slope on the short par-4 16th that left him a 6-foot birdie putt, he started walking right when he hit it, knowing the pace was too strong.
His worst score in these playoff events since the FedEx Cup began in 2007 was a 76 in the final round of this tournament in 2012 when it was at Bethpage Black.
Woods already is on pace for his fewest tournaments in a season when healthy — for him, that means not injured — and it could get even shorter. He is No. 28 in the FedEx Cup, and with points counting quadruple the value, a missed cut means he will have to play well at Medinah next week to return to the Tour Championship, where last year he won to cap off a remarkable return following four back surgeries.
All he was thinking about Thursday was not having to go home Friday.
“I'm going to have to figure out a way to get this thing under par and hopefully move on and have a chance on the weekend to keep progressing and keep going lower,” Woods said. “But I've got to get into the red at the end of the day tomorrow, for sure.”