Tiger's putting in PGA simply amazing
Forget about length off tee, Woods won with his flat stick
 Jeff Gross / Getty Images Tiger Woods had only a three-putt bogey and no double bogeys over 72 holes of the PGA Championship. |
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MEDINAH, Ill. - Tiger Woods has hit some amazing shots in his career.
He drove the green on a 347-yard hole at Doral. He hit 6-iron from 218 yards out of a bunker and over the water in Canada. His most famous shot might be the chip-in at the Masters that made a hairpin turn at the top of the ridge on the 16th green.
But he was equally proud of the most boring shot in golf, a special gift for swing coach Hank Haney.
“He told me Saturday afternoon, ‘Hank, you’ve never seen me putt good,”’ Haney said Monday night from his home in Dallas. “And I told him after he got done, ‘I’ve seen you putt good now.”’
The one club Woods singled out in his five-shot victory at Medinah was his putter.
He started his final round with a 10-foot birdie to seize the lead, then pulled away with a pair of 40-foot birdie putts, both of them tumbling into the cup with perfect speed.
“I just felt like if I got the ball anywhere on the green, I could make it,” Woods said. “It’s not too often you get days like that, and I happened to have it on the final round of a major championship.”
Oh, he’s had that feeling before.
It lasted an entire summer in 2000, when Woods won three straight majors among his nine PGA Tour victories and shattered the tour record for lowest scoring average with a mark of 68.17.
That once-in-a-lifetime season has become conversation at water coolers again, especially after Woods won the PGA Championship. It was his third straight victory, two of them majors, by a combined score of 60 under par and margin of 10 strokes.
Is an encore around the corner?
Conventional wisdom holds that 2000 was a special year that will never be matched. And as well as Woods has played, three victories over five weeks is hardly enough to draw any conclusions.
But if he is to repeat his mastery, it starts with the flat stick.
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Woods hit the ball so well in 2000 that his favorite shot was a 3-wood that had 2 inches of draw on No. 14 at St. Andrews. What often gets forgotten is that he made just about every putt inside 10 feet.
Haney has been revamping Woods’ swing the last two years, so it might seem self-serving for him to talk on the short game when everyone else is focusing 300 yards away, usually in the trees.
Then again, Haney gets criticized during hard times and ignored when Woods is winning majors.
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