Tiger's joy of six

Woods: happy again

It hurt. It hurt so bad, the pain was so excruciating at times and you just had to push through, deal with it and know it was going to be better tomorrow.

Tiger Woods
Quotes of the week

Tiger Woods says he is "ecstatic" with how 2009 has gone, despite failing to win a major championship.

Woods made his comeback at this year's WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship after an eight month injury layoff and has since gone on to win six tournaments including the Bridgestone Invitational and the BMW Championship.

However, he failed to make the cut at The Open Championship and finished sixth in both the Masters and the US Open before finishing runner-up at the USPGA Championship.

It is the first season since 2004 that he has failed to clinch at least one of the four majors but Woods says he is thrilled with his form following his rehabilitation from knee surgery.

He said on Golf Night: "This year, to come back after what I came off last year, if you'd have said I'd have won one tournament I'd have been ecstatic.

"I wasn't able to swing a club for six months, so to come back and win six times? Nobody would have predicted that.

"I never thought I would have had probably one of my most consistent years ever. If you take away the Match Play, in stroke play events I've only had two outside the top 10 - and one was in 11th!

"I think that's a pretty good year.

"A lot of people don't think that way but you have to be realistic. To have the year I had, I couldn't have predicted that. I was just hoping to get back and get in contention again, maybe win a tournament or two.

"To win six was huge."

Struggle

The world number one says his return to the top has been an uphill struggle and he has had to go through the pain barrier on several occasions.

He has had to adjust his swing following his injury, but he says all of the hard work has been worth it.

"I worked extremely hard to get to this point," he continued.

"I had great trainers, great therapists and I had to make a few adjustments with my swing early to try and protect it before it felt stable enough where I felt explosive again. That took months into the year.

"It hurt. It hurt so bad, the pain was so excruciating at times and you just had to push through, deal with it and know it was going to be better tomorrow.

"All the adjustments I had to make along the way, it was not easy. It was very frustrating, very hard to do but overall I'm so ecstatic at how the year has turned out."

Slip

Wood's best chance of clinching a major in 2009 was at the USPGA Championship, but he let a good position slip and eventually finished runner-up to YE Yang.

On his return to Asia to play in the HSBC Champions, Woods again congratulated the first Asian player to win a major championship - but says it could have been different if his own putting had not let him down.

He said: "To have an Asian-born player win a major championship? One, it was inevitable and two, it's good to have it be a person from South Korea.

"Everybody thought it was going to be KJ [Choi], but YE has had a pretty good little run over the last couple of years and he's developed as a player. He played great.

"I had a couple of chances to make some putts and I didn't make them. It was a frustrating week for me on the greens, I hit the ball probably the best I've hit it compared to a lot of major championships in the past, and I made nothing for the week.

"You can't ball-strike your way to winning a major championship, you have to putt.

"That's one of the things I look back on at that championship, if I'd putted well or putted normal the ending probably would have been different but you have to do it and YE did.

"He made all the putts, he drove it great and did the things he needed to do to win the championship and I didn't."