Woods gets a new major challenge

FA RMINGDA LE, N.Y.» Tiger Woods, the Masters champion, going for the second leg of the Grand Slam on a long, wet course at Bethpage Black.

It all sounds so familiar. For Woods, it feels entirely different.

The PGA Championship now occupies the second slot in the major championship schedule given its move to May for the first time since 1949, and with only a month between majors, Woods chose not to play a tournament since winning his fifth green jacket.

He is every bit the global superstar he was in 2002 when he followed a Masters victory with a U.S. Open title at Bethpage Black, but he is not No. 1 in the world. And along with being 43, he is two years removed from fusion surgery on his lower back.

“There’s more days I feel older than my age than I do younger than my age,” Woods said.

The new version of Tiger is more than capable.

He showed that last September when he won the Tour Championship at East Lake, his first victory since going through four back surgeries. And he showed in April, with his 15th major, that he was capable of challenging the Jack Nicklaus standard of 18 majors.

Still to be determined is whether Woods can be the dominant force he had been for a dozen years.

“I’m not looking at it like that,” Woods said. “Whether I’m dominant or not going forward, that remains to be seen. What I know is I need to give myself the best chance to win the events I play in, and sometimes that can be taking a little bit more breaks here and there, and making sure that I am ready to go and being able to give it my best at those events.”

This will be only the seventh time that Woods has gone major to major without having played somewhere in between, with mixed results. The most famous was in 2008 when he showed up at Torrey Pines for the U.S. Open on a shattered left leg and won in a playoff.

What held him back this time was emotional exhaustion from a moment in golf that won’t be soon forgotten. Lucas Glover had gone to the movies, taped the final round and was tearyeyed at the end, especially when Woods hugged his son. Brooks Koepka, whose last hope ended when he missed a 10-foot birdie putt on the 18th, recalls being in the scoring area, unable to keep his eyes off the TV.

“I think it’s something that any player, any fan, any golfer was probably glued to the TV at that moment watching it,” Koepka said. “It was pretty neat, pretty special for all of us. I was a little bit disappointed. But at the same time, that’s what our sport needed. We needed him to win a major.”