– Two notes about Tiger. One more serious (very serious) and another anecdotal and almost funny. Let’s start with the serious one. Assuming the misfortune of his withdrawal from the tournament, we cross our fingers that it really is just a flu or other type of mild illness… After hitting the ball with his 3-wood on the 7th tee, his gesture was one of denial, even though the ball landed gently in the middle of the fairway. Immediately, he decided to withdraw. It is true that now, more than ever, every gesture of his is analyzed in detail, but this context in which the events occurred is more of a specific physical problem (mechanical, to understand us) and not so much the discomfort that a flu or similar affliction can cause. It’s not a morbid question, it’s just a reasonable conjecture. And fearsome, because it would mean a brake on his slow and hard-earned rehabilitation.
What is a fact that we can confirm is that Tiger was already feeling bad on the 1st hole tee. “He just wasn’t the same, he wasn’t well, he was more subdued. You could see it before the round started,” acknowledged Gary Woodland, one of his playing partners, although he also claimed that Tiger had not told him anything specific about what was wrong with him. Certainly, Woodland’s perception, before hitting on the 1st tee, would also fit with a flu-like affliction or similar. We cross our fingers for it.
Let’s now go to the anecdotal note. As Woods is always under the spotlight, it turns out that a camera was already focusing on him live on the putting green, 55 minutes before he went out to play. Normal in his case. But he was seen sitting down, suddenly, and taking off a shoe to fit it better. And there, on the instep, on the sock, the logo of… Nike shone brightly.
– Patrick Cantlay is the outstanding leader of the Genesis Invitational after two rounds. Up there, five strokes separate him from his immediate pursuers, Luke List, Mackenzie Hughes and Jason Day. It is clear that so far he has played in another dimension the legendary course of the Riviera Country Club. More specifically, its greens. Whoever it is, is suffering a lot with the putter in hand. Everyone, except him. Up to five times he repeated in his statements after signing the card that they seemed to him the best greens he had seen on this course… Each one, logically, sees it in his own way and according to how it has gone.
He is getting tired of sinking putts of medium and long distance, agreed, but he has also solved with extraordinary naturalness all the short putts he has faced, one of the keys on this course. In Riviera, as soon as a player has a putt of more than forty centimeters long (it’s no exaggeration), ghosts fly over. The three-putts are the order of the day, but Cantlay has not made a single one. He has faced in the first two rounds nine putts of those that cause some shiver, between three and five feet, to save pars, and he has sunk them all. In fact, he only has one bogey in 36 holes and it came after a big mess on a par 3 (hole 16, on Thursday) and after throwing a magnificent putt of 18 meters to save the par that left the ball thirty centimeters from the cup…
He was asked yesterday with what attitude you have to face this week’s work on the greens. And he answered with sarcasm: “you’ve gone to ask the wrong guy. When you sink so many putts it’s very easy to have a good attitude”. Well, that’s it, for now he enjoys where the rest have nightmares.
Now it remains to be seen if everything flows in the same way for the Californian over the weekend. It’s incredible, but that guy, Number 7 in the world and a consistent player where there are, has been exactly a year and a half without winning a golf tournament, since he did it at the BMW Championship, in August 2022.
– Everyone suffers on the greens and Scottie Scheffler, of course, was not going to be an exception. This week, so far, he appears in 51st place in the Strokes Gained Putting statistic…
We said that Cantlay only has one bogey in 36 holes. Yesterday, in the second round, he left the card immaculate, without a single blot. Only two more players achieved it: Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele. Not a bad trio. Anyway, the best result of the day also corresponded to Max Homa (card of 65, like Cantlay, Hughes and Conners), who finally got the pleasure of sinking some putt from beyond three meters. There, in those distances that go from three to eight meters, the winner is practically decided every week, in any tournament. We’ll see if Homa has enough for that, because he’s far away, nine strokes from the head, although yesterday he gained almost fifty positions, coming from the depths.
– Blessed cut, whatever they say. In that fight, the cut one, Tiger Woods was going to be, before retiring sick after hitting the tee shot on hole 7. He was working very well, with courage, and it’s bad luck that he caught a flu this week. As it is that Jordan Spieth signed a wrong card and was disqualified. The charisma of these two players weighs the same or more than that of the rest of the competitors, so the blow to the tournament is considerable.
In that fight, the cut one, players like Wyndham Clark, Matt Fitzpatrick, Sepp Straka and Justin Thomas lost the fight. The guys from the pure and hard business will continue to argue that it’s funny to be without such players for the last two rounds, but there are those of us who still think that these kinds of situations are precisely an essential ingredient in sport, in general, and in golf in particular.
