Sky Sports | Golf | Columnists | Mark Roe

Search:

Sky Sports.com

Opinion Links: Opinion Home Page | Latest Expert Columns | Latest Blog Entries

The re-birth of Tiger

Posted: 07th August 2007 14:36

Subscribe to RSS Feed Send an email to Mark Roe Email Mark Roe

Tiger Woods: very strong again

Woods was clearly out of practice and out of form at Carnoustie for the Open but I expect to see a different major challenger this weekend.

Quotes of the week

Also see

PGA Championship - Golf live on Sky Sports

PGA Championship
Thurs - Fri, 7pm, SS1 & HD1
Sat - Sun, SS2 & HD2

"Tiger obviously loves the golf course at Firestone Country Club" is how I began to round off last week's column.

It turned out to be something of an understatement as, in magnanimous style, Woods obliterated the field in Akron to win his sixth World Golf Championship Bridgestone Invitational in only nine attempts.

It marked the return of Woods and a spectacular start to the latest chapter of his career, the one he began writing after the birth of his daughter, Sam.

Now that Woods is over the 'newness' of his daughter and back in the winning circle, he has to be man to beat again. At the Open Championship he said he couldn't wait to get back home and how much he had missed his wife Elin and his baby girl.

With the birth of a new child comes a whole range of new emotions to deal with but the bad news for the rest of the world's golfers is that it hasn't taken Woods long to come to terms with any new challenges.

Woods was clearly out of practice and out of form at Carnoustie for the Open but I expect to see a different major challenger this weekend.

I walked with Woods in two of his four rounds at the Open and he was taking lots of practice swings, unusual for him, and he struggled to find the feel and positive thoughts in his swing.

For him, that was about as poor as you had seen him play and he still finished tied for 12th. That is astonishing because he was totally out of sorts and I don't expect to see him like that ever again. Certainly the evidence of last week is that he will be very strong again at the PGA Championship, an event he has won three times.

I never played at Southern Hills, so I will readily admit that I don't know a huge amount about the course, but I can tell you that the players can expect it to be very, very hot and very, very humid out there.

This means fitness will play a part but there are a lot of guys out there on the tours now that keep themselves in very, very good shape too.

Long shots

While the odds are on Tiger to win his fourth US PGA title, the tournament has thrown out a few surprise winners in the last decade, with Rich Beem and Shaun Micheel long shots who have interspersed shared titles among Tiger, Davis Love III, Vijay Singh (twice) and Phil Mickelson.

There will always be guys who crop up and win major championships, like Todd Hamilton and Ben Curtis at the Open. There is an unbelievable amount of strength in the game of golf at the moment and an improvement in technology and that has brought everyone a bit closer together.

There are a lot of guys, because of the technology, who can play these long courses better and so you always get guys that pop up and win majors, in between the great players.

It happened back in the days of Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson with guys like Tom Weiskopf, a brilliant player, who came along and won the 1973 Open at Troon, his only major.

The great players slowly accumulate major honours but they won't win every week, so if gives an outsider a chance.

On any given weekend if someone is on his game and can stand up to the pressure, he can walk off with a big one.