Friday, October 19, 2001
Tiger changes game, shoots a 69 at Disney
By Steve Elling
The Orlando Sentinel
(KRT)
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. _ After six weeks on the shelf,
Tiger Woods was pleased to
report that he jettisoned some of the nagging swing no-nos that
occasionally dogged his game over
the past few months.
Then again, he also substituted some new vices.
After ending the longest midseason layoff of his five years
on the PGA Tour, Woods shot a
rollicking 3-under 69 at the Palm Course on Thursday in the first
round of the National Car Rental
Classic at Walt Disney World, in what was definitely a day of
rediscovery.
Once Woods brushed aside the cobwebs, he didn't universally
like what jumped out of his bag.
It was sort of like trading a careening hook for a boomerang slice,
or a string of cold-topped shots
for a case of the pop-ups. Well, relatively speaking, of course.
"A lot of things that you normally do wrong, I wasn't
doing wrong today," Woods said, laughing.
"But I got a couple of new ones in there that I have to fix.
It was nice to just go out there and play
again, to just compete. I missed that."
After three events in which he planned to play were either
canceled or deemed too risky to
attend since the events of Sept. 11, Woods found the mothballs
hard to shake. He found the golf
balls harder to hit. But his putter and short game kept him within
four shots of the leaders, so the
Eldrick comeback special received a mixed review. He is tied for
31st.
"I hit some shots that I'm not very pleased with or very
proud of, but I scored," he said. "That's
the name of the game, getting the ball around. First tournament
back, first round in a while, to be able
to shoot a halfway-decent score, that's not bad.
"I didn't hit the ball very well, but I putted good.
If anything, you'd figure you'd hit the ball
halfway decent and the last thing to come around would be your
touch. I just couldn't get the ball to
the green fast enough or close enough."
He definitely took the scenic route at times, keeping his
stand-in caddie and former college
teammate Jerry Chang raking sand traps and attempting to triangulate
yardages from where the
Disney deer fear to tread.
"Raking bunkers, doing the Pythagorean Theorem to get
(yardage) numbers," Woods cracked.
"Thank goodness we both went to Stanford."
Woods was tooling along nicely at 3-under par when he abruptly
pulled a drive into the trash at
No. 18, his ninth hole of the day. One of the amateurs in Woods'
foursome Thursday was sporting a
New York Yankees cap, shirt and golf bag, so it was only appropriate
that Woods hit at least one
big-league Yank.
"Typical," he groused. "I was playing well
heading into the _ well, not playing well, but scoring
well. I hit a bad shot at the wrong time."
The ball came to rest near some thick underbrush inside the
staked water-hazard line, and
though Woods probably could have extricated himself, he elected
to take a penalty stroke and a free
drop. He missed the green and failed to get up and down, making
a deflating double-bogey.
After scratching back to 4 under, he took the road less traveled
on his final hole, No. 9. Woods
hit his drive to the edge of a fairway lake, leaving the ball
on a severe downslope and inches from the
water. Trying to hack the ball toward the green without taking
a bath, Woods hit a 45-degree
you-know-what into the palm trees wide right, and made a bogey.
"I just flat-out shanked it," he said. "If
I let my weight go forward, I'm in the water. I'm going to
fall in. I'm trying to hold the (club)-face open, and I held it
open too much."
He's holding out hope that he can mount a comeback over the
last three days, but he admits that
the layoff has left him uncertain about facets of his game. For
instance, it was arguable which
generated a wider array of spray, his driver or the water slide
at Typhoon Lagoon. He hit three of
seven fairways on his front nine, for instance.
"I think it's really tough to come back and win a tournament,
especially if you haven't really done
a lot in preparation for it," he said. "It will definitely
makes things more difficult, no doubt about it."
___
© 2001, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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