After a 12-week layoff to recover from knee and Achilles’ tendon injuries, Woods has returned to competitive golf with the declaration, “I’m not like other guys.” No? That begs the question: then why is he trying to look like other guys, and swing like other guys? Why the little goatee borrowed from Jason Day? Why the continual tinkering with his strokes? In order to more perfectly imitate Hunter Mahan and Justin Rose?
Woods is on a search party to find himself and he doesn’t seem close to meeting himself in the mirror yet. He continues to insist he is just one small breakthrough from greatness again, when in reality, “He’s well below what he used to be,” says Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee. His performance last week — a tie for 37th in a field of 76 with a score of 1 over par in the Bridgestone — wasn’t much better than it seemed, despite Woods’s avowal that he was “encouraged.” Certainly, unevenness was natural after a layoff. But mostly what we saw from Woods was the same consistently inconsistent play that has plagued him for two years now: sprayed tee shots and three-putts. It’s to the point that you wonder if this is the real him. Maybe Woods can turn his game around in time to win his first major since 2008, but it seems unlikely.
“I’d be shocked,” Chamblee says. “You’ve got to drive the ball better than he’s driving it to compete in a major. I see him missing big shots at the big moment. He can’t string enough good shots together to get on a run and get confident, because he’s going to have a hiccup. He drives it way right, or way left, or misjudges a distance, or misses a short putt.”
The numbers don’t lie. Woods hit only 22 of 56 fairways last week, and he was in the bottom half of the field in putting, too, tied for 43rd. If he doesn’t recognize how he struggled to hold his rounds together, others do. According to Nick Faldo, “They’ve recognized that Tiger’s definitely lost his aura right now and they kind of are saying to themselves, ‘Tiger has an awful lot on his plate, I don’t need to worry about it.’ ”
The last time Woods played great golf, from 2007 to 2009, his accuracy off the tee was in the 66 percent range. This season, it’s just 49.6 percent. Driving accuracy has never been the ultimate bell-weather of Woods’s game, and it can be deceptive: There are occasions when a miss is actually a great shot, say on a drive-able par-4, or a long par-5 when he cuts a dogleg. But there’s nothing deceptive about the fact that Woods found just one fairway on the back nine on Sunday, and drove it so poorly he was 5 over par for a seven-hole stretch.
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