Jim McCabe

What a challenge Tiger Woods will be facing in February when he tees it up in the Nissan Open in a bid to match history.

I mean, how daunting a task is it to need to win at a place where you’ve never won?

That’s right, Woods is 0-for-11 in PGA Tour events at Riviera. He will tell you that it’s a golf course he loves, a golf course that he respects greatly, and since it’s in Southern California, where he grew up, you know he feels at home there.

He just hasn’t won there, which puts in jeopardy his chance to equal the late Byron Nelson’s seemingly untouchable PGA Tour record of 11 straight wins, because if Woods doesn’t win No. 10 at Riviera, it’s all over.

You’re scratching your head. You’re thinking Woods just won his sixth straight at the WGC AmEx Championship, so how is it I’m already looking at No. 10? What happened to Nos. 7, 8, and 9, you ask?

The ground shook, that’s what.

It was a 3-wood from 270 yards on the seventh hole at TPC Boston in the final round of the Deutsche Bank Championship on Labor Day. With an athletic fury so precise and so exquisite that your senses were left numb, Woods unleashed a shot that only he can hit. The hole had begun as a 600-yarder, but a drive and that ferocious 3-wood had reduced it to 10 feet.

He made the eagle putt to continue his thrust from three shots down to two ahead, and when the fifth straight victory was complete, all I could think about was the way that ground had shook at the seventh and how it reminded me of the way the ground had shook that February day in 2000. Back then it was the 15th hole at Pebble Beach, a routine 97-yard wedge shot, except that Woods holed the darn thing, an eagle that sent shock waves around the Monterey Peninsula and set in motion his sixth straight PGA Tour win.

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Six years later, it feels like 2000 all over again, only there is a strong belief this time around that Woods is — gulp! — better than he was in 2000.

“I hit it great and I putted well and I got some really lucky breaks (in 2000),” Woods said. “Basically, I’m doing the same thing now. I have more shots now, just because of so many more years of experience and I know how to get my ball around the golf course better.”

Assuming Woods skips the PGA Tour stop at Disney, the site of win No. 7 would be the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, a venue that hasn’t been overly kind to him. Although he’s won the Tour Championship once, he is 0-for-5 at East Lake. But in his last four stops there he’s a whopping 33-under with three second-place finishes, so it’s not like he’s clueless.

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