Tiger Woods has sufficiently recovered from winning his ninth major and headlines the field at this week’s $6-million Wachovia Championship.
Woods said the Masters win left him emotionally drained and that he recharged his batteries by going spear-fishing.
”I don’t know why it took so much more out of me,” he said. ”I flew home that night, got in about 1.30am and couldn’t sleep.
”As tired as I was, I was still wired. I stayed awake almost all night and was still on cloud nine the next day.
”Even when I went on vacation spear-fishing and had a great time, I was still not quite back to normal.”
It will be his first start since he beat Chris DiMarco in a play-off at the Masters more than three weeks ago. His attention now is on building on what he accomplished at the Masters.
”I got back home, rested a few more days and kind of laid low until I felt like getting back into it,” Woods said.
”All of a sudden one morning, I felt ready to start practising again, and the past week-and-a-half I’ve been grinding, trying to get ready, just making sure I don’t forget things that were successful during Augusta.”
Woods is well aware that his Masters victory, which ended a streak of 10 consecutive winless majors, hasn’t silenced all of his critics, mainly because of the way he bogeyed the final two holes of regulation to allow DiMarco into a play-off.
”If I had lost, I probably would have got ridiculed pretty good, and rightfully so, but the thing that made me so proud of the whole week was the way I played the play-off,” he said.
”After the poor swings I made on those final three holes [of regulation], to come back and hit my two best shots in the play-off, under the most extreme pressure, that’s when you know you’re working on the right things.”
With the Masters safely in his keeping, Woods has turned his attention to next month’s United States Open at nearby Pinehurst No 2, but he’s not thinking about completing the grand slam yet, because there’s little point looking past the next major.
He decided to play here at Quail Hollow partly because it suited his schedule, but also due to the quality of course, which has received almost unanimous praise in the two years it has hosted the fledgling tournament.
Eight of the world’s top 10 players are here, with only South Africans Ernie Els and Retief Goosen missing, and Woods is not the slightest bit surprised.
”If you have a great course, guys will play,” he said. ”All the great courses always seem to get the best fields. This is a great course, an old-style course. It looks like they just laid a course on the property, rather than move a bunch of dirt to create big mounds.
”We have too many courses now where they’ve created elephant burial grounds from a flat piece of property.”
Woods isn’t the only player emerging from hibernation this week.
Phil Mickelson is also making his first start after a disappointing defence of his Masters title.
”I feel a little bit of uncertainty as to how I will play,” said Mickelson, who finished 10th at Augusta. ”I had a couple of weeks where I didn’t touch a club, so I’m looking forward to seeing where my game’s at heading into the US Open stretch.”
DiMarco, meanwhile, is battling a sore neck and is not 100%. — Sapa-AFP