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Mahan had to settle for his third straight top 10, although he put on quite a show, even if hardly anyone noticed.
Most of the 40,000 fans at Congressional scrambled for a sight of the present and the future — Woods and Kim — until Mahan started dropping in putts from everyone on the back nine.
“I think everybody was watching AK and Tiger and expecting kind of a battle there, and I knew I just had to go low today,” Mahan said. “I figured great players up on the leaderboard like that, I figured they’d make it to at least 13 or 14 under.”
Playing with Woods for the first time — in the final pairing at Woods’ own tournament, no less — Kim walked with a swagger and a smile to the first tee, dressed in white pants and a royal blue shirt. He then smoked his driver some 25 yards past Woods, nearly holed out his wedge and tapped in for birdie for a quick advantage.
A four-hole stretch changed everything.
Kim three-putted the fifth for bogey, and Woods took the lead with an 8-iron over the water to 15 feet for birdie. Their day was summed up at the par-3 seventh, when both hit tee shots 6 feet away.
Kim missed, Woods made.
Kim then three-putted from 20 feet on the eighth, missing a 3-foot par putt.
The threat came from Mahan, an explosive player like Kim, minus the hip-hop.
He teed off more than an hour before Woods, then poured it on along the back nine with six birdies, including a 15-foot putt on the final hole to tie the course record.
Mahan was on his way to the range when they heard a roar a half-mile away and his caddie checked his phone to see that Woods had made birdie. Mahan finished hitting balls and was headed to the putting green when a young girl approached him for an autograph.
He might not have noticed what was written on the back of her T-shirt: “Tiger’s Back.”
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