When you come to think of it that is the secret of most of the great holes all over the world. They all have some kind of a twist. C.B. MACDONALD
From Steve DiMeglio at Golfweek on Tiger arriving in Chicago to play the BMW:
“I feel good,” Woods said as he got out of the courtesy vehicle. “Feel a lot better than I felt last week. Felt good this morning so I thought I’d give it a go.”
Woods needs a solo 11th or better according to the numbers crunchers to move on to East Lake where he is the defending champion.
Here he was arriving at the course Tuesday:
Absolutely zero movement in his hips and moving extremely gingerly. What the heck happened between winning at Augusta and now? Surely not a regress in the surgery? https://t.co/pkpTlymyvN
— Nick Bradley (@THENICKBRADLEY) August 13, 2019
If you’re a Tiger fan there are a couple pieces worth reading after his opening 75 at the 2019 Northern Trust, all but setting him up for a playoff exit next week, barring a resurgence. **And now a WD Friday morning.
ESPN.com’s Bob Harig considers everything we’ve seen since the Masters and concludes that odd decisions may not be helping his back.
Why fly overnight to The Open last month, arriving in the early hours at Royal Portrush right off the plane, to practice? With his own jet, Woods can fly when he wants, get the proper rest and treatment, and make sure he prepares and warms up properly. From the moment Woods set foot in Northern Ireland, he never looked right.
This week, Woods arrived on Tuesday afternoon, and soon was playing a practice round with Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka, trying to launch his drives with the longest hitters on tour. He barely warmed up, had just come from the plane, and rushed to get in putting practice before heading to a planned Presidents Cup dinner that lasted well into the evening. Then there was the quick turnaround to Wednesday's 7 a.m. pro-am time, and again he struggled.
Harig also notes that Tiger no longer travels with the physio of years past.
Eamon Lynch of Golfweek seizes on the lack of fight in Woods and concludes that Tiger’s season may have ended when he achieved his goal of winning another major. And Tiger’s just fine with that.
Woods has immense pride — even in the darkest of times that never changed — but that famous passion is gone, for now at least. He admitted this week to aches and pains that make high-level golf next to impossible some days. But there have also been days when he insists his balky back is fine and that he simply played poorly. “It’s a little bit stiff, yeah, but that’s just the way it’s going to be,” he said with a resigned realism.
And this…
No matter how poorly he played Thursday, or how truncated his run in the FedEx Cup playoffs may prove to be, there exists no measure by which Woods’ year can be deemed a failure. He carries himself with the air of a man who knows as much.
From Bob Harig’s ESPN.com report at the Northern Trust, where Woods played nine pro-am holes than chipped and putted for the second nine, a day after he was feeling great:
"Yes, there is concern, hopefully because of the pressures I'm going to be facing, hopefully put myself in contention,'' he said. "That's why it gets difficult. If you're missing cuts, who cares. You're taking weekends off and a couple extra days of rest.
"But I'm trying to get myself where I'm in contention, where it takes a toll on you, and that's what I want to feel. I want to feel that type of tiredness, where I have a chance to win. That's a good feeling.''
The desire is there, but the body is not cooperating.
Big lead, no Tiger making his first run at a major in years and what do you get? A 2.9 for NBC and ratings decline for the 2019 Open Championship.
From SBD’s Austin Karp:
British Open final round dropped around 42% in overnight ratings on NBC. This was coming -- no big names at top of the leaderboard, a big lead for Shane Lowry and a comp to 2018 when Tiger was winning on Sunday. 2019 rating easily lowest for NBC since it reacquired rights in 2016
— Austin Karp (@AustinKarp) July 22, 2019
Bob Harig reports news of a Woods-McIlroy-Day-Matsuyama Skins Game this fall the same week—mlitzvah!—of the new $9.75 million Zozo Championship in Japan.
The event appears to be part of Woods’ deal with GolfTV and probably seals the fate of a repeat of The Match, last fall’s day-after-Thanksgiving-AT&T synergy play.
While the dollar figures or format are not known, it’s great to see the once-successful format back. Harig writes:
How much this version of a skins game will resemble that is unclear, but this event is part of an agreement Woods has to provide content to GolfTV, an entity that does interviews and other features with Woods at international locations that at this time do not include the United States -- although there are negotiations to have the skins event televised in the U.S. market.
After Tiger’s 78-70 here at Royal Portrush, the inclination is to fret about what may be ailing Tiger Woods.
To put it another way, what ails him now is a far cry from anything we’ve seen in the past. Some rest and rejuvenation are in order.
Blunt assessment of Tiger Woods by Tiger Woods. From Dan Kilbridge’s Golfweek story on an opening 76 in The Open:
“I’m just not moving as well as I’d like,” Woods said. “Unfortunately, you’ve got to be able to move and, especially under these conditions, shape the golf ball. And I didn’t do it. I didn’t shape the golf ball at all. Everything was left-to-right. And I wasn’t hitting it very solidly.”
So much for the draw he had on Sunday. And this…
“Playing at this elite level is a completely different deal,” Woods said. “You’ve got to be spot on. These guys are too good, there are too many guys that are playing well and I’m just not one of them.”
Words that are music to any golf architect’s ear and likely to mean Tiger Woods will be a happy camper if he’s forced to push so many buttons.
Having walked a few holes with his practice pairing alongside Patrick Reed, Tiger was understandably jet-weary from an overnight flight and easing into the round Sunday, but by day’s end appeared to be striking the ball as well as he has lately, with only a couple of quack push-shots. But Tiger Woods otherwise seemed ready and willing to see what he could learn in three days about Royal Portrush, as Steve DiMeglio reports for Golfweek.
Tiger’s attitude toward the course is a good starting place:
“A lot of movement,” Woods said of his initial reaction of the course hard by the North Atlantic in the northern-most tip of the country. “A lot of decisions off the tees, with all the angles. Now, with the wind switching coming out of the south in the future, a lot of these shots we hit today are useless. So we’re trying to figure out what lines to take on and what lines not to take on. And these green complexes are so complicated, you have to miss in the right spot.”
It’s the question on many minds as Tiger returns to the major he nearly won last year and where his creativity, shot shaping and wind-management give him an edge over less-seasoned players.
But as he goes from Pebble Beach to The Open without a start, it’s reasonable to wonder if just waking up at 1 am is enough to get ready. David Feherty thinks so, sort of. Pat Ralph at Golf.com with Feherty’s comments.
“He sticks to a plan,” Feherty said. “I think a good deal of it will depend upon the weather, which I suspect being from there may not be great. We may get some real Open Championship weather. Personally, I kind of hope we do. There’s something traditional or special about playing golf in bad weather. And Tiger typically is not renowned as a bad weather player. I don’t know what sort of shape his back is in for that kind of thing, but I know Freddy [Couples] suffered with it over the years. But the only mistake I’ve ever made about Tiger Woods is underestimating him. He’s an unknown quantity at the moment.”
Bob Harig takes a deeper look into the numbers and considers Tiger’s chances at Portrush for ESPN.com, noting that Woods has never played the week before The Open as a professional. There was this headline-grabber last week from Padraig Harrington:
"I personally think if you're serious about winning The Open, you've got to be playing tournament golf at least before it," two-time Open champion Padraig Harrington said before last week's Irish Open. "You'd rather be playing links golf and being in a tournament than just [playing] on your own, so if you're serious about trying to win the Open, you should be playing at least one, if not two, of the events running into it.
"I was always mightily impressed when Tiger Woods would play in a major without playing the week before. I'd be a basket case if I didn't play the week before."
It should be noted that even when Woods went over early and hung out in Ireland, he was usually playing golf at an inland course and not on a links buddies trip.
I believe the “in the mail” line was probably tongue-in-cheek since this hopefully arrived via a very nice, secure delivery truck. Or not!
Love box it comes in, too…
85.5k Likes, 1,232 Comments - Tiger Woods (@tigerwoods) on Instagram: "Came home to another package in the mail. I think I can find a spot on the shelf for this one...."
The wrongful death lawsuit dropped on Tiger’s plate at the PGA Championship will move forward but without Woods as a defendant, reports ESPN.com’s Bob Harig.
The reason is fairly simple: Tiger is not an owner of Woods Jupiter where the young man who bartended there ultimately lost his life in a car accident.
According to Woods' attorney, Barry Postman, Woods invests in but does not own the restaurant.
"The decision was clearly appropriate and reflected the fact that Mr. Woods should not have been included in the lawsuit in the first place because he had nothing to do with Mr. Immesberger's death,'' Postman said in a statement. "While the situation was tragic, the facts will ultimately show that the cause of Mr. Immesberger's car accident were the many decisions made by Mr. Immesberger on the night of his passing.'“
Tiger’s third round 71 left him at even par and out of contention for the 2019 U.S Open, but he praised the balanced setup Saturday.
“I think they did a great job of setting it up so that we can make birdies,” Woods said. “And if you do miss them in the wrong spot then you still can get up and down here, which is not always the case.”
He did admit after the round that the cool conditions have made it harder to get loose. From Bob Harig’s ESPN.com story:
Woods was predictably coy when asked about any physical issues as he wore KT tape -- a therapeutic strip often worn to treat pain -- on his neck, just as he had during The Open at Carnoustie last year.
"When it's cold like this, everything is achy," Woods said. "It's just part of the deal."
I will side with Tiger Woods since he knows what he’s doing and certainly would never want to putt from above the hole at Pebble Beach, but it’s still interesting to consider the best strategy for playing a U.S. Open course. Yesterday in his 2019 US Open press conference, Woods explained his priority in approaching the Pebble Beach poa annua greens:
The trick to putting on poa is to make sure they're always below the hole. If you're putting downhill, it's like a Plinko effect, you're going to go every which way. The key is to be below the hole where you can take low lines and try and take the bumpiness out of play.
Strokes Gained Guru Mark Broadie has been studying the effort to get a ball under the hole now that ShotLink numbers are tracking putts from different parts of greens and is making the case that it all evens out on the greens. Granted, he wasn’t talking about specific grass types, but it’s still fascinating food for thought given modern green speeds and players wanting to be below the hole, even if it does not necessarily apply to Pebble Beach this week.
Simple: It’s very hard, over the course of a full season, for a player to leave himself a lot more easier putts than difficult ones, and vice-versa. Over the course of dozens and dozens of rounds, everything tends to even out. So planning to give yourself more uphill putts than downhill ones isn’t a strategy worth pursuing. No evidence exists to show that players can systematically leave themselves with easier types of eight-footers.
Strokes Gained founder Mark Broadie has developed another stat called scoring volatility and introduces it at Golf.com.
Now, you may say this one tells us what we already knew: some people make a lot of pars and play steady, boring golf. Like Ryan Moore and Billy Horschel, two recent leaders in non-volatility. Others make plenty of birdies and plenty of bogies.
But as with Strokes Gained, Broadie’s managed to craft a statistic allowing us as fans to put the magnificence of a performance into perspective, while also highlighting what may or may not be holding someone back.
So Broadie went back to Tiger’s epic 2000 season and made some amazing calculations. Certainly read the piece for full context, but this is amazing in terms of putting the greatness of a season-long performance into perspective:
That season, Woods made bogey or worse on a mere eight percent of the holes he played. (The PGA Tour average was 19 percent that season.) Tiger also comes out on top on the birdie side of the ledger—again during the 2000 season—where he won nine events, including three majors.
That year, Woods scored birdie or better at an astounding 32 percent clip, 12 percentage points higher than the Tour average.
Tiger Woods appeared to calm those concerned after his PGA missed cut at Bethpage with birdies on 7 of the first 12 at Muirfield Village en route to a 2019 Memorial final round 67 and T9.
From Steve DiMeglio’s story for Golfweek and from Woods bagman Joe LaCava.
“First 12 holes were an absolute clinic,” said Joe LaCava, Woods’ caddie. He still hit some decent shots coming in. It wasn’t like he played poorly, he just didn’t get anything out of it the last five or six holes.
“He’s certainly going in the right direction with good momentum. I thought the iron play was top-notch today. Definitely some good momentum and positive vibes from both (weekend) days. The quality of shots on a scale of one to 10, I would say were a nine.”
Driving was a strength for the week, reports Bob Harig in his assessment for ESPN.com.
Woods hit 12 of 14 fairways and 14 of 18 greens Sunday, needing just 26 putts. For the week, he ranked ninth in strokes gained, approach to the green and 10th in strokes gained tee to green. For the week, he hit 75 percent of the fairways.
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
