Tiger WD Roundup: Round One 2011 Players
/Woods had said his leg felt better. But from the opening tee shot at the TPC Sawgrass, he looked as bad as he ever has.
''The knee acted up and then the Achilles followed after that, and then the calf started cramping up,'' Woods said. ''Everything started getting tight, so it's just a whole chain reaction.''
The first hole could not have gone any worse.
He pulled his opening tee shot into the pine trees, leaving him a stance in the pine straw. Then he came up short of the green, his ball perched at the bottom of a steep bank that force another awkward stance.
The winless streak for Woods is now at 541 days. Not only is there no clear indication when he might win again, but now we have no idea when he will play again. There were certainly times Thursday when it appeared as if the last place Tiger Woods wanted to be was on a golf course. And when he left the property after his truncated first round, no one -- not even him -- knew when he would next be on a golf course. A man used to being in control suddenly now has precious little control of his future.
Woods looked nothing like the former world No. 1 he once was. He made bogey on the first, hit two balls into the water on the fourth to make triple bogey, made another bogey on the fifth and finished with yet another bogey on the ninth. He hit just one green and had just one birdie putt.
The 42 Woods shot on Thursday was not his worst nine-hole score as a professional. He has shot 43 four times, the most recent coming in last year's Wells Fargo Championship on the back-nine at Quail Hollow in the second round.
This is a different Woods in more ways than one. He’s winless since 2009. He has been rebuilding his life and swing after a sex scandal and subsequent divorce. And now again he’s dealing with physical problems in addition to emotional scars.
As one esteemed golf journalist said soon after the withdrawal, “Tiger’s Achilles’ heel is his Achilles’ heel. It used to be waitresses.”
Watching Woods saunter around the ninth green, surveying another lengthy putt to save par, he was visibly favoring his right knee. He looked like that sitcom character, Fred Sanford, but this was no comedy and nobody was laughing. Woods' game was junked.
Even allowing for the rust from the layoff, it was an atrocious round. He flubbed three wedge shots from close range, including dumping a pitch into a bunker on the ninth, after he had executed a soaring, 290-yard 5-wood from the fairway that sailed over the green and under a tree. Even the good shots turned out badly.
At times, Woods was more than a minute behind playing partners Martin Kaymer and Matt Kuchar and the caddies in walking from the tee to their second shots. Following his tee shot at the par-3 eighth hole, he watched the ball’s flight from a “flamingo” stance – his left foot lifted completely off the ground.
Why he even showed up at The Players - a tournament he doesn’t have much love for played on a course he dislikes - remains a mystery.
Maybe he felt he needed to repay tour commissioner Tim Finchem for allowing him to use the Sawgrass clubhouse as the venue for last year’s televised apology for the wake of his scandal.
Or maybe he just felt he needed to get in some practice before next month’s US Open at Congressional Country Club.Or maybe he was just trying to do the right thing and show up at the tour’s marquee event.
Whatever the motivation, it was clearly a mistake.
Woods wasn’t ready to play this tournament, in any sense.
I don't doubt that his left knee and Achilles' tendon were hurting, or that his left calf cramped up on him. But I also think Tiger Woods is about as physically tough as anybody who has ever played golf, and that if he liked the course and cared about the event and had striped his opening tee shot with a 3-wood instead of hitting a pull-hook, he would still be playing.
He was at the Players for only one reason: he needed, to use one of his words, reps. He needed more tournaments before the U.S. Open.
He did not practice again after the Masters until Monday; he played nine-hole practice rounds here Tuesday and Wednesday.
"This morning, felt fine during warm-up and then as I played, it progressively got worse. ... The treatment's been good. It's been getting better. It just wasn't enough."
Woods said his doctors told him it was OK to play.
"The more rest I get, the better it would be, obviously," he said. "Obviously, it's a big event. I wanted to come back for it and play, and unfortunately I wasn't able to finish."
**Brian Wacker talks to Sean Foley about his student's WD:
“At the end of the day if it’s been bothered before it doesn’t ever really truly heal,” Foley said. “You can be functional and productive on it but this comes from a guy that works hard and trains hard and is a perfectionist. The guy’s created a lot of speed for a lot of time. He’s an athlete and he’s fit but you can’t overuse your body that much and not have … there’s going to be some issues.”
