Reporting from Turnberry, Scotland — One year after the Royal and Ancient Golf Club boldly held a British Open with Tiger Woods 4,230 miles away -- and somehow pulled it off -- they're holding one with him present to the delight of most everybody and Tiger Woods.
Negotiating the callous crosswinds of Turnberry in 2009 trumps trying to get from one room to another in 2008.
"My day consisted of trying to get from the bed to the couch and then from there back to the bed," Woods said Tuesday in recollection of golf's week at Britain's Royal Birkdale club. "That was my day. I was going through some of the worst pain at the time. Just basically the 2 1/2-week, two-week mark, I was in pretty good pain."
Recovering from knee surgery of June 24, 2008, he barely watched the 137th British Open on England's west coast. He missed Greg Norman's surreal run to the 54-hole lead at age 53. He only really caught up with the last nine holes on Sunday, long enough to feel "amazed at how windy it was" and to marvel at Padraig Harrington's back-nine 32, which Woods found "pretty phenomenal."
Now Harrington returns as the two-time defending champion -- and reigning PGA Championship titlist -- who has missed six cuts in his last seven tournaments while retooling his swing, as Woods returns as the overwhelming favorite who has won thrice since March after retooling both his knee (in 2008) and his swing (in 2003-04-05).
As Woods tries to decipher a British Open golf course he had never played before this week, remember that he arrived in 2006 trying to decipher a British Open golf course he had never played before that week.
And that tournament went rather swimmingly.
"You just have to do more homework in your practice rounds," he said, words laced with wisdom after having come to Royal Liverpool on England's west coast in 2006, when he shot 67-65-71-67 for an 18-under-par 270, won the tournament for a third Claret Jug and, along the way, even devised an unforeseen way to play the course.
He used his driver once all week.
"That's what's so hard about links golf; it's hard to tell you I'm going to hit 10 drivers or I'm going to hit zero drivers; I don't know," he said. "At Hoylake, the game plan was to probably hit about four or five. But as the ground got faster and faster and faster" -- in a scalding British summer -- "and my 2-iron and 3-wood were going over 300 yards, you get to a point where you really can't control how far the ball is going to go. So the driver, I didn't really utilize it that much."
