Notah Begay shoots down skeptics of Tiger Woods’ back injury

Tiger Woods’ most recent back injury is real and the actual cause of his withdrawal Sunday from Firestone, not the hacker-like swings he was taking, as some haters of of all things Eldrick may choose to believe, says Tiger insider Notah Begay.

“A lot of emphasis has been placed on his scorecard and that hasn’t really been the primary focus for him,” NBC/Golf Channel analyst Begay told GC colleagues Sunday night following a chat with his former Stanford teammate, who had returned to South Florida from the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. “The first thing he was concerned with was making sure that he didn’t sustain a serious injury.”

Begay, who has had similar back issues but without the microdiscectomy surgery Tiger had on March 31, said that, despite the obviously pain Woods was in during Sunday’s Firestone finale, the 14-time major champion’s status for this week’s PGA Championship remained “up in the air.”

In his third competitive event since surgery, Woods winced, grabbed at his backside, and gingerly bent down to pick up his tee after driving his ball into the rough on the ninth hole. He left the course shortly thereafter, but his latest injury occurred several holes earlier when he played a shot from an awkward lie in a bunker on the par-5 second.

Falling back down a steep slope and landing heavily on his foot “jarred” his entire lower back, which went into spasm, Woods said later, before leaving the property to fly home to Jupiter Island.

“When I saw the swing on two, I thought that there might be a little bit of an issue down the road because I just saw that it was an extremely difficult lie,” Begay said. “It wasn’t the actual shot that did it. He mentioned to me that when he landed on his right foot as he fell back into the bunker that kind of tweaked the region that he’s been trying to improve over the last few months.”

Until that moment, Begay said, all systems were go for Woods to start the men’s final major of the season; a critical event if Tiger has even a whiff of a chance of earning enough points to compete in the FedExCup playoffs and the Ryder Cup.

“Everything was moving in the right direction,” he said. “For him, it’s been in getting the range of the motion and trying to get a better feel for the shots and the execution of shots. He’s seen some decent progress and he’s basically playing one out of every four good rounds and that’s not going to get it done on the tour and he knows that … He just needs to improve the performance but this is certainly going to be a setback.”

Begay noted that Woods was to meet with his doctors Sunday night or Monday morning and that he had three days before his early a.m. tee time with Phil Mickelson and Padraig Harrington on Thursday at Valhalla in which to determine his playing status.

“There’s certainly no timeline,” Begay said. “He knows the golf course and would try and probably get up there at the latest on Tuesday night and try and at least have a little bit of work on the course to get used to the conditions.

“But that’s all up in the air,” Begay emphasized. “I couldn’t talk to any certainly about whether or not he’s going to play next week.”