Musings: Woods talk overshadows Ogilvy's win

With his win at the World Golf Championships-CA Championship, Geoff Ogilvy becomes only the third player to win more than one World Golf Championship title. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. The buzz coming out of Doral this weekend was all about one man, and it sure wasn’t Ogilvy.

Talk of any player other than Tiger Woods is swallowed up in the tsunami that is Woods’ assault on golf history. Such is Tiger’s dominance at the moment that, on those increasingly rare occasions when he comes up short, the headlines have nothing to do with the actual winner. Read any story recapping the CA Championship (except for the one you’re reading right now), and the first name mentioned will invariably be Woods’.

After starting the season with three wins in three starts on the PGA Tour, running his winning streak on Tour to five, Woods was prompting breathless talk of a “perfect season” — NBC even used the phrase in its promos for this weekend’s coverage. Forget a mere calendar year Grand Slam. Normally level-headed, clear-thinking people were starting to wonder whether Woods would lose any tournament in 2008. Clearly, such talk is insane, but so is Woods’ game right now. The last time Woods showed up for a PGA Tour event and failed to win it, the calendar read Sept. 3, 2007, when he was finishing second to Phil Mickelson at the Deutsche Bank Championship. The last time Woods finished outside the top two? The 2007 British Open, where he finished tied for 12th.

Over his previous 26 Tour events, Woods had 16 wins. A 16–10 record might get you fired as Kentucky’s basketball coach, but in golf, a sport in which any one of 100 players has the ability to get hot and contend on a given weekend, that number is beyond mind-boggling.

And by his own admission, Woods had his chances at Doral, but even he was forced to acknowledge that, as the saying goes, golf is not a game of perfect, although he’s as close as it comes. Woods’ pedestrian third-round 72, while those around him were going low, left him with too much ground to make up on Sunday and Monday morning in the rain-delayed event. Not that he didn’t give it a good run. Trailing by five on the back nine on Monday, Woods posted a charge, as we knew he would, with three birdies in a six-hole stretch to climb within two shots of Ogilvy, who was plodding along making pars. But it wasn’t enough. Woods’ 15-under finish left him two behind Ogilvy, who made nine back-nine pars including an improbable chip-in at 13, and one behind Retief Goosen, Jim Furyk and Vijay Singh, each of whom matched Woods’ final-round 68.

In the end, Woods’ four three-putts over his 72 holes proved to be his undoing.

“I had a shot at it and just came up short,” Woods said. “I think it’s a great sign, what happened this week, to make that many mistakes and only be two back.

“People don't really understand, you need to have something happen, a positive thing happen to you out there in order to win tournaments,” Woods said. “I heard Geoff bladed one in the hole for par. That's what you need to have happen. Those are the things that have happened to me, and things weren't going that way this week.”

Pardon us if we don’t shed any tears of sympathy. When you’re playing like Woods is, you don’t need any breaks.

Eyes on Augusta

Attention now turns to the Masters. The CA Championship was the last star-studded field we’ll see before the game’s elite head to Augusta National, and as Johnny Miller pointed out during the weekend’s broadcasts, it looks like several players have azaleas on their minds. Many of the world’s greatest players are rounding into form at precisely the right time.

Ogilvy has a U.S. Open to his credit and joins Woods and Darren Clarke as the only players to win multiple World Golf Championship events, which feature the strongest non-major fields in golf. Retief Goosen seems to have found his game after a strange hiatus from weekend leaderboards. Vijay Singh has finished in the top five in four of his last five events. Jim Furyk is playing as solidly as always. Steve Stricker went nuts on Sunday, posting birdies on seven out of eight holes over one stretch on his way to a final-round 63, and is a serious threat to win his first major in 2008.

Phil Mickelson, while absent from the first page of the CA leaderboard, had a solid weekend and has a win and a second already this year. Ernie Els played poorly at Doral, but he posted that breakthrough win at the Honda Classic that he desperately needed. Defending Masters champion Zach Johnson had a top-10 at Doral and should muster a credible title defense.

While Woods will head South as the heavy favorite, this year’s edition of the Masters could be the greatest in history. 

Streaking

Here are Woods’ finishes in his last nine PGA Tour events:

Tournament	Finish
CA Championship	5
Arnold Palmer Invitational	1
Accenture Match Play Championship	1
Buick Invitational	1
Tour Championship	1
BMW Championship	1
Deutsche Bank Championship	T2
PGA Championship	1
Bridgestone Invitational	1

Meanwhile…

While the elite fired away at a tame Blue Monster course, golf’s junior varsity, as it were, competed at the inaugural Puerto Rico Open presented by Banco Popular. Veteran Greg Kraft held off Jerry Kelly and first-, second- and third-round leader Bo Van Pelt to earn his first PGA Tour win in his 379th career start. Kelly continues his solid play; along with his third-place finish at the Sony Open, Kelly now has two top-3s in a single season for only the third time in his career.

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