Oddsmakers tag Woods as the favorite anyway
For all the talk of Tiger Woods not being the favorite this week at the Players Championship, the betting public isn’t buying it.
Going off at odds like 6-1 (Ladbrokes) and 7-1 (Bodog), Woods remains the top choice, though his customary margin over the next contender has decreased significantly. Phil Mickelson is listed at 8-1 by both betting services with no one else at better than 20-1.
But is it reasonable to expect Woods can win after the worst 36 holes of his professional career, a 74-79 — 153 at Quail Hollow, where he missed the cut by eight strokes and finished tied for 140th in a field of 156?
“It’s getting better no doubt,” Woods said to reporters Tuesday. “It couldn’t get any worse.”
But in a practice round Tuesday at the legendarily difficult TPC Sawgrass, a course that demands precision over length, Woods hit several balls into water hazards. When asked what went wrong at Quail Hollow, Woods said it was everything.
“I didn’t hit the ball very good, didn’t think myself around the golf course very well and didn’t putt well, didn’t chip well,” Woods said. “I teed up really well. I didn’t have any balls fall off tees. It was good. It just kind of got worse from there.”
Woods has a history of rebounding from the few missed cuts of his professional career, finishing in the top five in four of six occasions. But in each of those tournaments, Woods had taken at least a week off to regain his stroke.
Woods compared his recent woes and the state of his game to 2006, when he missed the cut at the U.S. Open after the death of his father. Woods also admitted Tuesday to being distracted by the changes he is trying to make in his life and rattled by the unwanted attention he has received along with revelations of his extramarital affairs.
“A lot of people, when they go through treatment, they’re able to make these adjustments in anonymity. I’m not, and that makes it a lot more difficult,” Woods said. “[I] certainly didn’t have the distractions last time getting ready for events. You know, helicopters don’t normally fly over you on the range and kind of hover and film you. That wasn’t the case [in 2006], but that’s the case now.”
The Players has not been kind to Woods, who has finished out of the top 10 more times at Sawgrass (eight) than in any other pro tournament and won just once (2001). One of Woods’ fondest memories, however, came at Sawgrass in 1994, when he won his first of three straight U.S. Amateur titles.
After all that has happened since, it will be interesting to see whether Woods can recapture his magic this weekend. He tees off Thursday at 1:28 p.m., playing with Ian Poulter and Hunter Mahan.
Poulter, the runner-up last year, expects, like the betting public, to see Woods rebound.
“You can never write the No. 1 in the world off at any stage. You know, the discussion four weeks ago would have been how poor a season Mickelson had had to that point, which everybody was talking about, and you can see what great players in the world can do very quickly,” Poulter said. “He found something in his swing on the range, and he goes out and wins the Masters. How impressive a last 18 holes he shot around there, and you can see what that’s done to his year. And I would expect Tiger to be doing something very similar.”
