Tiger Woods has always been a glass-half-full sort of guy.
He’d be a mental coach’s dream student in that he has an uncanny ability to simply ignore the negativity around him and focus only on the positive.
Some might call that whistling past the graveyard.
Living in Tiger’s Happy Bubble has worked nicely enough for him for most of his 34 years. The question now, though, is whether the past ten months have brought just too much bad stuff for even him to ignore.
“It has been a long year,” Woods acknowledged Wednesday. “It’s been a long ten months. It’s been difficult. It’s been a trying time for a lot of people who are friends of mine and who know me. It’s been tough, no doubt.
“It’s not only (affected) concentration, but also preparation. I haven’t been able to practice as long as I normally have when I’ve been out here. But things are starting to normalize, and that’s been a good sign.”
On the eve of the Bridgestone Invitational — a tournament he’s won seven of the ten times he’s entered — Woods appeared as confident as I’ve seen him this year.
He had, a colleague noted, his old game face on.
Things were not only normalizing, but he said he felt “very excited” about his game.
He’s not been very excited about much on the golf course -—or, certainly, off it — throughout this most forlorn and winless of years.
“If you look at my career, I’ve never been one of those guys that just plays awful and then all of a sudden just plays well,” Woods said. “You’ll start seeing trends. I’m starting to put the pieces together of late, and I’ve very excited about that.”
Does he really mean it? Or is he talking himself into it?
We’ll get a gauge on Thursday when Woods tees off at 1:50 p.m. ET along with good friend Lee Westwood, who along with Phil Mickelson could take the world No. 1 ranking away from Woods this week.
“No,” Woods responded when asked whether retaining the top-ranking he’s held for the past five years provided motivation. “Winning golf tournaments takes care of a lot of things and being No. 1 is one of them.”
Another would be making the Ryder Cup team to play in Wales.
“I think if I do well this week, I should sew up my spot,” Woods said.
Woods has dropped so far in the rankings he’s no longer an automatic choice; he’d have to rely on United States captain Corey Pavin to pick him. He sounded like a man who didn’t want to rely on the whims of a captain.
“I’m planning on playing my way into the team,” he responded not once, but three times to questions about whether he’d play if chosen by Pavin.
Was he being evasive, or merely insulted by the insinuation that he won’t be making the team on merit?
As is often the case with Woods, the answer’s not immediately obvious.
I asked him about his extraordinary late season-success in recent years. Since 2006, post British Open he’s played in 17 PGA Tour events and won 12 of them. More remarkably, he’s finished runner-up in four of the other five. The only one he had no chance of winning was last year’s Deutsche Bank event outside of Boston, where he finished in a tie for 11th.
“I never knew that,” he said. “Might be the venues. I love playing here. I think in my career I’ve played pretty good on certain venues.”
It’s clear that much of Woods’s confidence in his game stems from his improved driving, which he calls “the best in years”. Since switching to a harder ball at the AT&T National, he’s regained his distance, which has helped his confidence.
“Apples to apples,” he said, “Give me the same golf ball as the other players, I can still move it.”
He decided to change last month because, he said, “I was losing too much distance.”
Why not change earlier then, I asked?
“I just haven’t switched because I was trying to get my game back,” he said. “A lot of other things were going on, so I didn’t want to make too many changes.”
Woods said he wasn’t panicking that he hadn’t won yet because he said he’d “been through periods like this before” in the late 90s and also in the middle part of this decade.
“Just got to keep being patient, keep working, keep building, and keep putting the pieces together, and when they do come, when they do fall into place, that’s usually when I will win a few tournaments,” he said.
What was revealing was that Woods admitted to what his former swing coach, Hank Haney, privately complained about: that Woods didn’t work as hard on his game as he did when he was younger.
“Nor should I,” he said, “My kids are more important.”
I’m not sure that it necessarily follows that it’s some kind of a Sophie’s Choice: that a golfer has to choose either one or the other. But whatever the reason, he’s not been practicing, especially his putting, and the result has been the most hapless season of his career on the greens.
“My speed has been off all year,” said Woods, who’s gone back to his old putter after flirting with a newer Nike model at St Andrews. “I’ve three-putted quite a few times, which I don’t do normally. Just had to go back to basics and practice a little bit more. I haven’t worked on my putting probably as much as I should have, probably the last couple of years actually.
“I haven’t had time. Life has changed.”
It sure has.
Now he’s trying to change it back, starting this week.
