I am still not sure what leaves me more incredulous: that a 42-year-old father of two is taking long pulls out of a Monster Energy bottle on a hot Columbus afternoon or that the 42-year-old is a remade Tiger Woods who has somehow come back from the dead to lead real, actual PGA Tour events.
Tiger Woods held a dang weekend lead at a real PGA Tour event. Here’s what we learned.
Tiger is as dialed in as ever from tee to green and it was good enough to put him in the lead on Saturday at Muirfield Viallge. We can’t wait for Sunday.
For the first time in this remarkable 2018 return, Tiger held the lead on the weekend of a PGA Tour event. Woods got to 11-under late in his third round of the Memorial, pulling even with Kyle Stanley at 11-under for a moment. He’d bob-and-weave around that leading number for an hour on Saturday before getting in the house at 9-under, safely inside the top 10 and probably within striking distance going to Sunday at Muirfield Village.
After opening with an ugly 39 on his front nine Thursday morning, Woods posted a second-nine 33 and followed it up with two straight rounds of 67. The scary part is it could have been so much better. Here are five quick takeaways from another impressive checkpoint in this comeback.
Tiger is so f—king dialed-in
It’s hard to overstate how well Tiger is striping the ball this week at Memorial. It’s not just better than expected or back to some prior vintage when Tiger wasn’t a broken down 40-something. It’s among the best of his career. He’s leading the field in strokes gained tee-to-green this week. His Friday round was the second best mark of his career in that statistic.
That same ballstriking was there again on Saturday, really from the very first hole. When he missed the cut at Riviera in February, he lamented:
One of my hallmarks of my whole career is I’ve always hit the ball pin high with my iron shots, and I have not done that. My wedge game is fine, but my normal iron shots that I’ve always dialed in for much of my entire career, it’s just not there.
Tiger figured it out quickly and he is hitting the ball as well as he ever has with a fused back and operating as his own swing coach (which maybe should have happened a decade ago). This is not a fluke. His iron play has always been the strength of his game and it’s fully back to being a reliable strength again.
And yet ... it could have been so much better
Tiger is around the lead at the 54-hole mark and he’s putting like garbage. His putting stats on Friday were incomprehensible.
He was second-to-last in putting on Friday and Saturday wasn’t an improvement. He’s leaving a lot out there and not capitalizing on that sublime ballstriking. He said yesterday’s round could have been a 62 or 63 instead of a 67. On Saturday, he stuffed it to birdie distance on the 2nd hole, 3rd hole, and 4th hole and missed each birdie putt to begin the day with a bunch of disappointing pars.
Unlike some swing defect that may need a week or a month to fix, the putter can be a fickle club that comes and goes in an instant. After a miserable putting week in Charlotte, we saw Woods start rolling them in on the weekend at the Players and rocket up the leaderboard. That kind of run could come on Sunday at Memorial and lawd would it be a scene.
Par-5 dominance
Another hallmark of Tiger’s career success is complete and total ownership of the par-5s. Those are birdie holes and even eagle holes for everyone on the modern PGA Tour now. But Tiger always put some distance between himself and the rest at those opportunities, using them to build on his leads and wipe out his competitors’ hopes.
His par-5 scoring this year, however, has been underwhelming. He’s blown a lot of those scoring chances. The week at Muirfield started with more of the same. He not only failed to post a red number on his first par-5 of the tournament, but actually gave a shot back with a bogey on his second hole Thursday morning. At his next par-5 of the week, he made a double bogey.
A 3-over start on the first two par-5s is a quick way to miss the cut. Since then? He played the next 10 par-5s in 11-under. He’s feasting on those holes like he did in the past.
There are still nerves
Channeling Johnny Miller here, but there are going to be some nerves with Tiger. How can there not be? It was evident on Saturday when he got near or on the lead. He blew a short bunny putt at the 14th hole from 3 feet. It was almost a tap-in birdie to tie the lead and came after he caught a nice break off a slope — the kind of break in recent years that would have gone the other way and left his ball hung up in the rough in an impossible spot. But he busted the short putt way past the hole from almost gimme range.
Then with the lead in sight, Woods yanked his tee shot hard left at the 15th hole, arguably his worst swing of the week. He also tugged back-to-back wedges late in the round when he was either sitting on the lead or one off of it. To top it off, he added some hideous three-putts at he 16th and 18th to take steam out of the moving day charge.
Not every shot is going to be perfect but it has been a long time since Tiger was in these positions with real chances to win. There are going to be nerves and I think we’ve seen that at different spots this season, including Saturday.
Some context on how far we’ve come at Muirfield Village
I have no idea what is going to happen on Sunday. There’s a glut of incredible talents ahead of and around Tiger on the leaderboard and many of them still have a lot of holes left to push the lead higher while Tiger sits in a clubhouse sipping a post-round Monster.
But no matter what happens on Sunday, I’ll view this Saturday round against the context of just how godawful it was the last time Tiger played the weekend at the Memorial Tournament. On Saturday in 2015, Woods posted an 85, his highest round of his career. He was wild off the tee, a complete mess with his irons, had short game yips, and couldn’t make a putt. Every break that could bounce bad did bounce bad. It was depressing and alarming and no matter your opinion of him, you had to feel some empathy.
That Saturday 85 was the start of a generally miserable summer and then two years on the shelf rehabbing various back surgeries of different severity. Now he’s hitting it 330 yards off the tee with some of the fastest clubhead sped on Tour. He’s back to being money with his irons, historically the strongest differentiator of his career. Those short game yips are long gone and he’s found the touch that got him out of impossible situations so many times the last two decades. And he’s making almost every cut and sometimes even contending with regular late Sunday tee times.
He’ll play late in the day again this Sunday, which, given where he was the last time we saw him at this venue, is context and an achievement worth appreciating.
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