Tiger Woods isn’t ready to win a golf tournament.
Not yet.
That much is obvious after three days at Whistling Straits, where the world No. 1 made the cut at the weather-interrupted PGA Championship but lost ground in the third round and goes into Sunday tied for 31st.
Woods can’t win a tournament again until he solves the Rubik’s Cube that his golf swing has become.
Until then, he’s bringing a proverbial knife to a gun fight.
No one can win a tournament, much less a major, when they’re dead last in fairways hit.
On this longest of Saturdays, Woods had to play 30 holes.
It was certainly a challenge but at the same time it presented an opportunity because the conditions were benign. There was no wind to speak of and the greens were soft and receptive.
But birdies don’t come from the gorse and inumerable bunkers at Whistling Straits.
Woods hit only eight fairways in those 30 holes and shot only 2-under par in that stretch.
So while the gunslinging 20-somethings Nick Watney, Dustin Johnson and Rory McIlroy were firing at flags from the short grass and getting to double-digits under par, Woods was playing his heart out just to tread water.
No surprise, then, that he’s 10 shots behind Watney’s lead.
Seventy-two players made the cut at the year’s final major and Woods wasn’t just 72nd in fairways hit but tied for 67th in greens hit in regulation.
That’s a ball-striking double whammy that usually guarantees nothing but a very early tee time Sunday morning.
But this is where this week’s given hope to Woods.
His play on and around the greens suggests that the old Tiger, the supreme grinder who’d find a way to salvage a par from the parking lot — the Tiger that was MIA in Akron last week — may be back.
That tells me that he cares about golf again.
Because he didn’t care last week at the Bridgestone Invitational. Or certainly he didn’t care enough.
Woods has never had the most reliable swing in golf, even when he was winning everything as a junior and an amateur he still strongly relied on a supernatural short game.
But now, when he swings hard — and this is a man who likes to go at it as fast as anyone on the PGA Tour — he has no idea where it’s going.
Time and again on Saturday — following from his struggles on Friday afternoon — Woods would finish his swing off balance, his right shoulder in a high, contorted, unnatural position and a pained look on his face.
I don’t know what Sean Foley, the young Canadian who’s been working with Woods, is going to do for him.
Foley teaches a Stack ’n’ Tilt type of swing, though one move that will help Woods is the steeper shoulder turn Foley likes to see on the backswing.
Under Hank Haney, Woods flattened his shoulder plane, introducing the variable of timing.
Aside from too many foul balls, what’s killed Woods this week has been the way he’s butchered the par 5s.
Since turning professional, Woods has been the best in the game at converting birdies on par 5s.
But this week, where Watney is 8-under par on the par 5s, Woods is 1-over par. In other words, nine of the 10 shots he’s trailing by.
“Tell me about it,” said Woods. “You’ve got to make birdies on the par 5s and I haven’t done that.”
Yet after his round, Woods maintained that his game was coming together.
He and Phil Mickelson, who fell out of the picture with a 73 in the third round, are very much alike in that sense: always looking on the bright side.
“Things are starting to solidify, which is good,” he said of his swing.
“It’s not like I’m working on eight different things. It’s a couple of key things, and it feels a lot better.”
Overall, he said, he was “far more closer to encouraged” than discouraged with the state of his game.
“Why? Because I feel so much better with how I’m hitting the golf ball now. The striking, the sound. The feel, more than anything. It feels good.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always look so good.
