Tiger's Performance at the Memorial Shows He Still Has Plenty of Work Left To Do
"Today was a lot better," Tiger Woods said when he was describing his finla round 74 at the Memorial Tournament.
The only problem with that statement, is his Sunday 74 followed a Saturday 85 so it could not have gotten much worse. While Woods improved 11 shots on Sunday, much of the discussion was about the 85 Tiger shot on Saturday, his worst single round as a professional. After making the cut on the number on Friday at 1-under and showing glimpses of the old Tiger at times, his 15-over par weekend left everyone scratching their heads and having more questions then answers, including Tiger.
“This is a lonely sport,” Tiger said Sunday. “The manager is not going to come in and bring the righty or bring the lefty, you've just got to play through it. When you're off, no one is going to pick you up either. It's one of those sports that's tough, deal with it.”
What Tiger dealt with this week were some historically bad numbers for the 14 time major winner. In addition to his Saturday 85 being the highest round he had ever shot as a professional, Woods for day total of 14-over 302 was his worst four day total of his career as well.
Credit Tiger for not quitting though. Plenty of us would have simply said "this isn't working" and walked off the course, and I'm sure plenty of us have. Not Tiger though. He went out Sunday and played by himself in under three hours and said after that maybe Saturday was something that needed to happen.
“I had to go through yesterday. I had to go through those painful moments, just like I did at Torrey and Phoenix to be able to make the leap I did at Augusta,” Woods said. “Yesterday was the same thing. It was just unfortunately on a golf course like this where you can't get away with much. It kicked my butt pretty hard.”
Tiger now has time to work on his game some more before we see him again at Chambers Bay for the U.S. Open. The question now becomes, will we see the Tiger that showed up at Augusta National and looked like he was close to having everything figured out, or will we see the Tiger that went out this weekend and shot 85-74 on a course he has won on five times in his career?
The most surprising thing is right now nobody, not even Tiger, probably knows the answer.
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