Challenged briefly, Tiger builds big margin
Woods struggles with swing, still shoot 5-under par 67 to lead Target by 6
 Reed Saxon / AP Tiger Woods, left, and Jim Furyk shake hands after the third round of the Target World Challenge on Saturday. |
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THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. - Tiger Woods kept stopping his swing to check his position, and he looked neither happy nor comfortable with his progress. This was on the practice range, and it never got much better on the golf course Saturday at the Target World Challenge.
The result was a 5-under 67, the second-best score of the day.
That four-shot lead he took into the third round turned into a six-shot margin heading into Sunday.
“He’s very, very good,” Masters champion Zach Johnson said, stating the obvious on a day when little else made sense. “If he’s in the lead, the gap seems to go the other way. That’s just the way it’s been. Is it a fact? Is that the way it always is? No. But it’s awfully close.”
Woods overcame some crooked shots with a few clutch putts, none bigger than a 35-footer for par on the 14th hole when Jim Furyk was poised to turn the final golf tournament of the year into a two-man race.
Four holes later, it was a one-man show.
Furyk dumped his next tee shot into the water and made double bogey, Woods finished off his round with a birdie, and everyone else started thinking that $840,000 for second place maybe wasn’t such a bad way to end the season.
“I got away with a couple today,” Woods said. “You just have to grind so much harder and look at where you need to miss the golf ball instead of looking up at the flags all the time.”
Furyk didn’t play poorly except for his 6-iron on the 15th that he said “barely hit the grooves.” He wound up with a 69 and earned another date with Woods in the final round Sunday.
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“What’s Tiger at — 18 under? What am I, 11? That’s too far,” he said. “Part of it is who’s in front of you. It shouldn’t be part of it, but when it comes to one individual, that’s part of it.
“I would be very comfortable with seven shots myself,” he added. “However, if I was Tiger Woods, I’d be more comfortable.”
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Woods was asked what advice he would give someone trying to make up a six-shot deficit.
“Make a lot of birdies,” he said, smiling.
Woods made them seven of them, but the bigger shots were for par. Starting the round with a four-shot lead, he kept his margin with an imaginative pitch from about 30 yards short of the 10th green, hooding his sand wedge for the ball to skip up the slope of the green and stop 2 feet away for birdie.
But on each of the next four holes, Furyk looked as though he would pick up a shot.
Woods hit his drive well to the right on the par-5 11th, so severely blocked by trees that he pitched out nearly sideways, and he wound up holing an 18-foot putt to match birdies with Furyk. On the next hole, Woods got up-and-down from a bunker while Furyk missed a bending birdie putt from 8 feet.
The big blow came on the 14th.
Woods found a huge clump of mud on his ball from the middle of the fairway, and his approach sailed left and plugged into the side of a bunker. The best he could do was blast out some 35 feet past the cup.
Furyk, coming off a birdie on the 13th to reach 14 under, was already in for par when he watched Woods posed over his putt and quickly lift his putter when the ball disappeared.
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