Tiger - It's Go Time

I'm staring at the early stages of a beautiful sunrise over very brown mountains.... Not ideal, to say the least.

Jeff Babineau with the play-by-play of Tiger's Pro-Am round:

Playing alongside Pawan Munjal, CEO of the tournament’s title sponsor, Woods

appeared to be free-swinging, hit his driver fine and even made an eagle (driving the 350-yard seventh hole, which played downwind, making a putt of 20 feet). He added three birdies in his round, hit some terrific approaches into Nos. 2 and 17, a pair of par 3s, and even saved a nice par from the sand at his nemesis hole, the 470-yard 18th, where he made three of his six double bogeys in last year’s event.

How did Pawan arrange that glamour pairing?

Brian Wacker recounts the "YouTube Golfer" comment of Tiger's kids from Tuesday's presser, but also revisits this Groundhog Day aspect:

“Last year I was still struggling with a little bit of pain,” Woods continued. “I was able to hit some good shots, able to play, but in looking back on it now, I look on it as playing in slow-mo but it was as hard as I could hit it. I didn't realize how bad my back had become and how much I was flinching and just how slow I was. I didn't realize it because it's been a slow degrading process. I thought I had some speed, thought I was playing halfway decent, shot some good scores, but now I've looked back on it and man, I didn't even have much at all.”

I'm pretty sure that he told us last year that he wasn't in pain, but I'm sure he's being completely honest with us this time....

And this from Pravda's Karen Crouse:

To try to manage his discomfort, and the insomnia that was a byproduct of the shooting pain that traveled from his back down his leg and into his foot, Woods misused prescription drugs. Between shots during a practice round on Monday, Woods said: “I was just taking drugs on top of drugs, just trying to kill the nerve pain. It was like something hitting your body about 200 times a day. And the thing is that I didn’t know when it was coming.”

Back pain is no joke, so let's first hope he can play with his kids....  To me, the most significant aspect thus far is Tiger speaking of having fun playing for a few shekels with the boys....  when did Tiger ever speak of the fun aspect of golf?  

Mathew Rudy instructs in how to watch Tiger....  With an adult beverage, I might have suggested, though he goes with this:

But even if Woods has recovered a lot of the speed he lost from age and multiple injuries, 

is that the prime indicator that he's on his way to recapturing the form he had in his five-win 2013 season—the last time he looked like his "real" self? Several top teachers say seeing speed is nice, but they'd be looking at different indicators if their own students were in Woods' shoes. 

Tony Ruggiero works with Smylie Kaufman, Lucas Glover and Zach Sucher on the PGA Tour, and says that clubhead speed—and birdies and bogeys—would be the least of his concerns. "Does Tiger have to have enough speed to be in the mix with the average player out there? Sure. But I don't think we'd even be seeing him at all if he didn't have that," says Ruggiero, who is based at the Country Club of Mobile and the Sheraton Bay Point Resort in Panama City Beach. "Even when he had all of his speed, his misses tended to be big, wild ones. What do they look like now? That's a lot more important now, because his short game hasn't been what it was."

I think it's way too early to worry about his misses.....  I've said it before, but last year's performance was pretty damn good, though it ultimately meant nothing.   

I'll leave the dissent to Curmudgeonly James Corrigan, who nails it:

OPINION: When Tiger Woods tees off in the Bahamas on Thursday (Friday NZ time) it

will not merely be a golfer taking on a golf course, or, indeed, taking on the other 17 players in the Hero World Challenge. 

It will be the cynic in us all taking on the romantic in us all. 

In truth, the cynic should be giving a couple of shots as the odds are firmly in their favour. And not just because Woods has not played competitively in 10 months because of a fourth back operation. No, when it comes to Tiger and his comebacks, the cynic has an overload of spin and manipulation at which to roll his eyes.

Thank God it was labelled as opinion.... Want more?

Have we forgotten that 12 months ago he also told us he was "pain free"? Has it slipped our minds that just two months later in Dubai he swore those grimaces and flinches were not what we thought? "I wasn't in pain with my back at all," he said after a first-round 77. And guess what? Woods pulled out of the tournament 18 hours later. Suffering from acute back pain.

Yes, we felt fools then, but we had been played for fools before. In February 2016, a respected golf writer reported that Woods had suffered a major setback and was struggling even to sit. "Absolutely false," retorted Woods' agent, Mark Steinberg. "It's reprehensible that someone makes up something and it's treated like a real story." So we left it alone and, lo and behold, what did Woods admit on Tuesday? 

"I was in bed for about two years," he said. "People asked me, 'why don't you go out to dinner?''I can't', I'd tell them. 'I can't sit'." Now, you tell us what is "reprehensible"?

I don't feel like a fool when lied to, though I do bear it in mind the next time....

In the unlikely event you haven't OD'd on The Big Cat, there's news of a forthcoming biography:

Now, at last, we are going to get a definitive biography of one of the most important and enigmatic athletes of our time, in Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian. It

will be released next May by Simon & Schuster, a 150,000-word opus that is the result of three years of painstaking work and more than 400 interviews. "We feel like the book is comprehensive, immersive and detailed," says Keteyian, in the first public comments about the project. "It's a 360-degree panoramic view of his life. And even Earl and Tida's life, which is just as important in many ways."

Is 150,000 words a lot?  I've never heard a word count for a book, only for magazine articles and the like.

But if Hank's opus was The Big Miss, this is The Big Tease:

In golf circles it has long been whispered that Tiger Woods would focus on the question of whether or not the eponymous protagonist used performance-enhancing drugs, which he has always denied. Woods has been dogged by these rumors since the 2009 reveal that he was treated by Anthony Galea, the disgraced Canadian doctor who was arrested for smuggling human growth hormone into the United States. (In 2011 Galea pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of bringing mislabeled drugs into the U.S.) Benedict and Keteyian acknowledge that there is a meaty chapter in the book examining the PED question but at this moment are not at liberty to divulge any specifics.

That's always been a troubling connection, the more so because he's never deigned to explain it....  But we've also never been clear on whether HGH and other PED's would actually help a golfer....

I happened to catch Golf Channel's replay of that '97 Masters earlier in the week, and that kid had the perfect body for golf.  Why he felt compelled to beef up, this observer will never understand. 

There's some other interesting stuff going on, but no time at the present.  I'll be back as time permits.