Something special happens in golf whenever Tiger Woods is in contention to win a golf tournament. When you throw in a leaderboard that would instantly make any major tournament one for the ages, the PGA Tour simply doesn’t get any better. This weekend was no exception.
Bunker Rake: Tiger Woods saves the world
In case you were too busy watching NASCAR, college basketball or DeAndre Jordan destroying Brandon Knight this weekend, here’s what you may have missed in golf news.
Mike Ehrmann
Tiger rolls in style at the Cadillac -- Just how good was Tiger’s win on Sunday? He’s certainly won bigger golf tournaments by bigger margins. However, this week marked the SEVENTH time Tiger won this WGC event... but that’s just the beginning.
Sunday’s victory also marked win number 14 in Florida (he also has 14 in California), the fourth tournament he has won seven times (WGC-Bridgestone, Farmer’s Insurance Open, Arnold Palmer Invitational are the other three) and his fifth title in his last 19 starts. From a career-win perspective, nobody has won more frequently than Tiger in the history of golf.
PGA tournaments should be like NASCAR -- Didn’t you just love this week’s leaderboard? Names like Graeme McDowell, Phil Mickelson, Keegan Bradley, Adam Scott and even the struggling Rory McIlroy were all in the mix this week, which translated to booming television ratings. The WGC’s 4.4 overnight rating was the best pull for the tournament since 2006... when Tiger last won it. Furthermore, the rating tied NASCAR’s pull over the weekend.
If the PGA Tour marched this same group of players out to every tournament -- similar to cars and drivers in NASCAR -- there would be similar ratings every single week. Heck, we already slap a ton of sponsorships on the “hoods” of these players; why not send out the same field every week? No one would ever agree to it, but just imagine the possibilities.
Masters odds have been released -- While I’m not a betting man (because doing so would be immoral and wrong), I was pleasantly surprised to see the early player odds for this year’s Masters. Some names of note:
Louis Oosthuizen, who almost won the damn thing last year, is at 30/1. Keegan Bradley, who was in contention last week at Doral, is at 40/1. Charles Howell III, who ousted Tiger in the first round of the WGC-Accenture Match Play, is a longshot favorite at 125/1. Tiger is now at 4 to 1.
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