Let’s focus on the positives of a round to forget for Tiger Woods at the PGA Championship:
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With a birdie at 16, he prevented his first round with less birdie in a major championship since 2010.
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His approach shot at 18 was the kind of vintage Tiger that keeps his fans coming back, a dart 208 yards out that crawled up to five feet from the cup.
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He will have plenty of time to take off from his favorite San Francisco restaurant and come home on time to see the leaders.
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He does not break bones. Hey, little wins, right?
Small wins are all that Woods can push on at this point in the week, given that the big ones are now well out of reach.
Woods finished the day at +2 for the round, and +2 for the tournament, after two of the final three holes were fouled. He walked 10 strokes to the clubhouse behind leader Haotong Li, who was still an hour from tea for the day.
An unremarkable day turned angry on the eighth hole, where Woods began with a run of false fours from six holes that effectively bound him out of whatever bad hope he might have had this year to compete. His putter, so faithful on Thursday, left him completely abandoned. He lost 0.33 strokes on the green, a sharp departure from his once immutable days with the flat stick.
“I didn’t do anything early on,” Woods said of his put to the round. ‘I had some bad shots that put me in bad corners. Just like [Friday], I did not make any pitfalls to pass that momentum. I fell behind and had to fight back. ”
Woods is now focusing on the playoffs of the FedEx Cup and the US Open. He has bought his career today after a major focus sprint, and he is now only two left in the year. Woods played only one tournament after the dismissal by quarantine, and the rest showed, even though Woods did not want to concede it afterwards.
“I’ve had a number of years with long layoffs, where I had to go back and do a lot of prep,” he said. “I know how to do it, I just have to do it.”
After the round, Woods acknowledged that his chances of catching Jack Nicklaus’ 18-year-olds were getting harder with each size.
“The reality is that the golf courses are getting bigger. They get longer. The margin between making the cut and the lead is a lot smaller than ever, ‘he said. ‘It’s getting closer and it’s getting harder to win events, but you look at the Leaderboard of most major championships, you see the same guys. May not always be the same winners, but you see that the same handful of guys are there. They understand how to win big championships, how to win the big events, how to pluck their way along, how difficult it is to win these big events.
Woods will wrap up his PGA Championship on Sunday in one of the earlier clutches.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter at @jaybusbee or contact him with tips and story ideas at [email protected].
