Woods’ year could still turn out OK

As the blast furnace commonly called Oklahoma prepares for the last major of the golf season, 2007 has crept close to resembling 1998, 2003 and 2004, the only seasons in the 11-year Tiger Woods supernova in which he did not win a major championship.

After Woods won two majors in 2005 and two more in 2006, he seemed primed in 2007 to barge further from his major total of 12 toward Jack Nicklaus’ record total of 18.

Instead, he’s worked on another Nicklaus feat, the latter’s 19 second-place finishes in majors. By adding to his total at the 2007 Masters and U.S. Open, Woods has reached four.

Then he finished 12th in a British Open he never quite solved, a British Open in which Sergio Garcia provided an apt demonstration of how Woods has made front-running look deceivingly easy.

“I wasn’t consistent enough hitting the ball close enough to make birdies, and subsequently I was on the periphery of trying to win a championship,” Woods said.

That left him with the PGA Championship Aug. 9-12 at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Okla., and that lent some symmetry. When Southern Hills last gussied up for major golf, it wound up witness to the halt of a phenomenal Woods surge.

If he could win this time, it would see the halt of a halt, even if finishing 2-2-12 in three majors represents only a fussbudget’s idea of failure.

Southern Hills, whose major winners include Hubert Green, Raymond Floyd and Nick Price, held its sixth major tournament with the U.S. Open in 2001, a full Woods swing reconstruction ago, and Woods roared in as the holder of all four major titles.

At least publicly, experts thought the course suited him, as did most courses on Earth, seemingly. “Would I put money on me? Probably not,” he wryly said then. “Just because I don’t think it would be a good business decision with those odds.

“Now, do I like my chances? Yes.”

The outcome bore striking similarities to the just-completed British Open, in that Woods lingered just below contention but never quite butted in, in that he finished also 12th, and in that his absence helped disclose everybody else’s incapacity to close out majors.

As the 72nd hole at Carnoustie featured an array of pressurized blunders, the 72nd hole at Southern Hills 2001 featured a slapstick thud of jaw-dropping missed putts. As Carnoustie had a playoff, the 2001 U.S. Open had a two-man Monday playoff in which Retief Goosen, previously famous only for being struck by lightning, joined the ranks of major winners by defeating Mark Brooks.

Woods shot a commendable 74-71-69-69, three over on a par-70 course on which only four players broke par. He had particular trouble with wedges on No. 9, where he’d make prodigious drives to workable distances, then chunk the approaches, two into the sand and one that came back down the slope.

He wowed Sunday spectators by requiring only two shots to reach the green of the 642-yard No. 5, a hole that will play 653 next month.

As the Masters champion that year, he won no more majors, but rebounded in 2002 to win the Masters and the U.S. Open. From there, he went 10 majors without a title -- with three top 10s and two top fives -- as he rebuilt his game and acquired naysayers.

His mini-”drought” today stands at three, and the latest manufactured doubt about his supremacy could be heard here and there at Carnoustie. It concerns whether the birth in June of his first child, a daughter named Sam, might deter him.

“They have been saying that a lot,” he said. “First it was getting engaged, and then it was getting married, and now it’s having a child. It’s always something.”

He began as a twice-defending champion with a pristine 69 that had a foreboding look. On the No. 1 tee for the second round, though, he yanked his drive so far left that it hopscotched into the Barry Burn, and while he grinned then and forgot that soon, nothing seemed pristine from there.

“I spent a lot of time lag-putting and a lot of kick-ins from the lag putts,” he said.

That left, eventually, Garcia and Padraig Harrington to arm-wrestle to succeed Woods as holder of the Claret Jug, and some slapstick ensued before Harrington prevailed.

Afterward, responding to Nick Faldo’s assertion earlier in the week that European players hadn’t been winning majors because they’re too chummy with each other and too rich on top-10 finishes, Harrington said of Faldo’s time, “There was less players in the worldwide scene. I think more players are capable of winning a major now in terms of you had [then] a few really unbelievable standout players.

“Nowadays besides the one standout player, because a lot of other players are capable of winning majors, there’s no point in me looking at one person and thinking he’s a rival.”

Even just after victory, he still very much remembered the one 12th-place standout player.