Tiger Woods blames illness for disappointing USPGA exit as he fails to meet the hype
There is a flip side to the Tiger Woods effect, as the touts discovered here on Saturday. A day after he missed the cut at the USPGA Championship, the tickets were going for approximately half of face value on the resale market.
Brooks Koepka is very good, many Manhattaners clearly thought, but not good enough to drag us to Long island.
At the course, there was a palpable sense of reality having reared its unwanted head into golf’s fairytale. Five weeks after being reborn at the Masters, Woods had all too quickly looked an ageing champion again, with rounds of 72-73 that meant him missing out on weekend berth. And his own resigned words did very little to assist in the raging of the dying ball-flight.
In truth, that was because there was absolutely no need for bravado. The fatigue and soreness Woods felt after his Augusta heroics persuaded him to eschew a preparation event and skip straight from major to major. The new schedule - with the USPGA moving forward from August - did not help. Woods is never usually one for excuses, but this was inescapable. To compound the rust, he was taken sick on Wednesday and missed another day of practice.
"Definitely not,” he replied if he had managed to put in anything like a proper build-up. “Just don't feel well and just not able to do it. I’m the Masters champion and 43 years old and that’s a pretty good accomplishment. I thought resting would be better so I would have the energy to play But that’s a nice problem to have.
“I've enjoyed being the Masters champion again and the [US] PGA was a quick turnaround and unfortunately, I just didn't play well. It’s just the way it goes.”
This is how it is for Woods now, and how it will be. It was inevitable that the old Tiger hype would flourish in the wake of his first major in 11 years and perhaps it was too easily overlooked that he has a fused spine following four back operations.
Yet this poor showing - just his ninth missed cut in a near quarter century in the majors - should not initiate a daft trend to write him off again. There are four weeks to the US Open at Pebble Beach - where he won in 2000 by 15 strokes - and he will likely be seen at the Memorial event in Ohio before then. For Woods it is time to get back to work.
“I’ve got to start feeling a little bit better first… and then we’ll start cranking it back up,” he said. “I just wasn’t moving the way I needed to. There’s going to be days and weeks where it’s just not going to work. But there’s no reason why I can’t get up to speed again.”
