WAS Tiger Woods really away from competitive golf for eight-plus months recovering from knee surgery?
You certainly couldn’t tell by watching him dispatch Australian Brendan Jones in the first round of the Accenture World Match Play Championship yesterday in Arizona.
Should we have expected anything less from Woods, who won his opening match 3 and 2 but was never truly challenged by Jones?
Of course not.
Ron Levin, a veteran PGA Tour caddie who was on Jones’ bag, had caddied in Woods’ midst a number of times prior to yesterday and he was taken aback at how Woods showed little sign of rust from his layoff.
“You couldn’t tell anything had changed,” Levin said. “Shoot, he came out with a birdie-eagle start. He’s right where he wants to be.”
So, too, was Jones – for a while.
Prior to meeting Woods for the first time, which he did shortly before the match (“Tiger was nice and cordial,” Levin said), Jones joked that he was going to ask Woods for “three a side.”
Asked if Jones believed he could beat Woods, Levin said, “Hey, the U.S. hockey team beat the Russians. One day in match play anything can happen. Obviously, he was going to have to play great golf. He gave it a run. I was proud of him. He hit a lot of good shots. He was 2-down after two holes and he didn’t hit a bad shot.
“The whole plan was not to give Tiger any holes. I wanted him to let things happen and not try to make things happen. I tried to tell him stupid jokes all day.”
In the end, though, Woods was too good. Does that sound familiar?
“I told Stevie [Williams, his caddie] it felt like we haven’t been gone,” Woods said. “It was business as usual.”
Business as usual for Woods is winning and that’s what we should expect him to do this week – win.
Woods, despite not having played competitive golf for so long, despite coming off a reconstructive knee surgery that can toy with an athlete’s confidence, is going to win this thing. And when he does, it’s going to further enhance his larger-than-life legend.
Bottom line for Woods is this: Yesterday was a round he needed to get out of the way. Look for it to get even better as the week progresses.
“It just came down to playing the game again,” Woods said. “That felt good. I thought it would take longer for me to get into the rhythm of the round and try and find it, but I came out and I had it.”
Just like he always had. Business as usual. Scary.