U.S. Open at unfamiliar Chambers Bay a stern test for Tiger Woods

 

Coming off the worst performance of his career two weeks ago at a Memorial Tournament he's won five times, Tiger Woods now embarks on a far more daunting challenge: Going for his 15th major in the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay, a course in coastal Washington on which he's never played a competitive round.

"It's going to take quite a mental effort to get out of the hole he's in," said fellow Jupiter Island resident Greg Norman, who will make his U.S. Open broadcast debut alongside Joe Buck this week as Fox's analyst.

"The more times he shoots an 85, the harder it is for him to get out of that hole."

While Norman and Buck made it clear they will be, as Norman put it, "very careful not to make it into a Tiger show," both are also wary of dismissing the 14-time major champion.

"I just don't see how you go in with any expectation of him being among the leaders on Sunday," Buck said. "But could it happen? Absolutely."

It was eight years ago this week when Woods won his last major, and talk that he could win four more and catch Jack Nicklaus has dropped to a whisper. But Golf Channel analyst Notah Begay, who has known Woods since the two were teammates at Stanford in the mid-'90s, isn't writing anything off.

"I'm fairly certain he will win again, and I'm fairly certain he will win another major," Begay said.

"There's a certain amount of genius that Tiger possesses as a player that none of us, no matter how much we know about the game, how much we've been around the game or how much personal experience we've had firsthand with the game, will ever understand."

Woods' crisis previous to this one came when his chipping woes were on display at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in early February. Begay joined him soon afterward as he put in some work at home.

"I had some concerns because I'd never seen anybody overcome either mental or technical deficiencies that he was exhibiting in those rounds, and within two weeks of that he looked me in the eye and said 'I can fix this.' I was like, 'Well, I don't believe you.' "

Two months later, after skipping three of his usual stops at the Honda Classic, Doral and Bay Hill, he turned up at the Masters and had done just that.

Begay recalled that after Woods had won his first major at the 1997 Masters by 12 shots he talked about needing to make improvements in his game.

"I looked at him like he had three heads," Begay said, "and then he goes all of 1998 without winning.

"We could very easily have said, 'You don't know what you're doing, go back to what was working in '97.' But then we started to see the changes take effect. In '99, he won a couple more majors, and then we saw the wonderful years of 2000, '01 and that whole stretch."

Through it all, Woods continued to tinker with his game and change swing coaches, going from Butch Harmon to Hank Haney to Sean Foley and now to Chris Como. With Woods' 40th birthday six months away, Norman said those changes have taken a physical toll.

"Those are major swing changes, and when you make a change like that you have to hit a lot of balls to get the old swing out and the new one in," Norman said. "That's a lot of hitting, and do that a lot when you're approaching 40 and your body doesn't recover as well as it did in your 20's and early 30's."

Still, as Golf Channel's Frank Nobilo pointed out, if Woods can get his game straightened out he still has time to achieve his goals.

"(He) could perhaps do something over the next five or six years, and deep down he must have (that) feeling, that he could have five or six really productive years (if) he could put the pieces together," Nobilo said.

But only, Begay said, if he stays healthy, which based on the last few years would seem to be a longshot.

"He can't afford any more surgeries or physical setbacks that keep him out more than three months ... every setback is like in dog years. For every month, it's seven months in recapturing your game and getting the timing back," Begay said. "And the other big factor is motivation. He's won 79 times, 14 majors, he beat everybody, everywhere around the world, and it's tough to find the motivation to just get up and go out and do it again."

This article was written by Brian Biggane from The Palm Beach Post and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.