Tiger Woods ended a disappointing week at the 2020 PGA Championship in San Francisco with a morning 67 on Sunday that left him 1 down in the week. His score of 279 over the course of four days at TPC Harding Park will not leave him in doubt and probably will not be enough to even finish in the top 40, but there were Sunday signs of life after two consecutive days of mediocrity of the winner of the four-time PGA Championship.
While it’s a little easier to ask freely on a Sunday if you are not even close to the lead, Round 4 was perhaps the best Tiger who hit the ball from tea to green all week. He also made a few putts – two birdies of 10+ feet – but mostly he spent himself better on scoring with solid rides and an iron game that has been sharp since returning to the Memorial Tournament three weeks ago. And unlike Friday and Saturday, he actually capitalized on them.
“I felt a little better today,” Woods told CBS Sports after his round. “The greens weren’t that fast. They were definitely not that spicy with the marine layer, and the wind didn’t pump and dry it out really. The golf course played a little slower, he played long. The iron shots in the greens that ‘. t they play real yardages, if not more. “
We’ve talked about a lot of different things when it comes to Woods ‘game this week – his short game, his distance, his elite iron game, his record at TPC Harding Park among them – but the one thing I did not do’ I realize that we had not discussed until it was raised on Sunday is his back. It apparently always seems to go up once a week during a tournament, but Woods said it sails smoothly through the Bay.
“It held up pretty well this week. All things considered as cold as it is,” he said. “Warm-ups that are good, and the body responds pretty well all week. Stayed free. It will be nice when it’s warmer, but for this week I was very happy with how I stayed warm. I kept my “I made sure I always floated. I’m looking forward to a week away and coming back.”
There are no big, sweeping takeaways of a finish for Woods outside the top 40, as we are the rest of the year. You can not have days from tea to green like he did on Saturday and expect to struggle. You can not be sly with your short game, as he was the middle two days and expect to score. The older he gets, the harder it will be to maintain his physical presence at major championships for an entire week. This has been true throughout golf history, and Tiger has not been released.
Woods will join majors in the future because of his spirit (that and he still beats hell with his strikers), but the consistency with which he serves will be more frequent as the years wear on.
The best sign for Woods when he goes into the rest of 2020 – and it sounds like he will be back for The Northern Trust in Boston from August 20-23 – is that he played a stress-free, pain-free (or on its at least as pain-free as it will get) four rounds in cold, wet, windy conditions.
It’s not a win on the scoreboard, but it does bode well for what the future holds for Big Cat, as he sees the next six months over the next 11 months and does his best to join a short game that does something. arrest and march must go to main championship No. 16.
