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Rarely has a top-10 finish seemed so much like a victory. Playing in his ultra-eagerly-awaited first competitive golf tournament since early February, Tiger Woods entered the invitational Hero World Challenge with global expectations on edge but showed there was no need for concern \u2013 at least in the immediate aftermath of the tournament. <\/p>\n
As Rickie Fowler reeled off seven consecutive birdies in a front-nine 28 and eventually won by four shots, Woods finished all four rounds (considered a success in itself) and was tied for ninth in the middle of the 18-player field following rounds of 69-68-75-68.<\/p>\n
That might have been 10 strokes behind Fowler, who closed with a 61 for an 18-under 207 and beat overnight leader Charley Hoffman into second place by four shots, with Tommy Fleetwood and Justin Spieth another stroke back joint third, but it was \u2013 arguably \u2013 better than most people expected. Apart from Tiger himself \u2013 perhaps. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited,\u201d he said after his round on Sunday. \u201cI had the adrenaline going and overall I\u2019m very pleased. I knew I was going to be able to play all four rounds, that wasn\u2019t going to be an issue. The issue was how was my scoring going to be, how was my feel, how am I going to get used to the adrenaline in my system for the first time in a while.\u00a0That took a little bit of time. I was still good with my irons, I drove it pretty good all week, made some good putts. I showed some good signs, I hit some really good shots out there and (it\u2019s) a bright future.\u201d <\/p>\n
Along the way he beat 2017 FedExCup champion Justin Thomas and world number one Dustin Johnson, climbed from 1199th in the world rankings to 668th, and showed speed and power with his full swings \u2013 seemingly without any discomfort despite a total of four back surgeries since 2013.<\/p>\n
The next step is a return to the U.S. PGA Tour in 2018 (this was a non-official event), and there is speculation his first full-field Tour event could be the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in late January, the last place Woods played in an official Tour tournament. He has won the event seven times and also collected his last major, the 2008 U.S. Open, at the same venue. <\/p>\n
Tiger himself said, \u201cWe\u2019re going to sit down, we\u2019ll figure it out, where I\u2019m going to start, how much I\u2019m going to play, rest periods, training cycles, the whole nine yards. My expectations are we\u2019ll be playing next year. How many, where, I don\u2019t know yet, but we\u2019ll figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the meantime, he will celebrate his 42nd birthday on 30 December, and plans to continue his recent trend of playing money games against Fowler, Justin Thomas and other young stars from the Tour.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure the guys will have some denominations they want to play for,\u201d Woods said.\u00a0\u201cJT was already alluding to that as we were playing today so when we go home these guys are awesome, they want to play almost every day. They want to compete, they want to see me back out there, and it\u2019s really nice to have that type of camaraderie.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he sharpened me up a little bit,\u201d Fowler said. \u201cIf his back holds up and he keeps swinging the way he does, there\u2019s no doubt that he can go out and win. Tiger\u2019s still going to have that similar effect when you see his name on the board coming down the last nine holes and being in the mix. You know he\u2019s not scared. He\u2019s done it, he\u2019s been there before. <\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t played up against him in his prime. I think we\u2019re all looking forward to having the chance to play with Tiger down the stretch. I wouldn\u2019t say guys are scared. I think they\u2019re more excited about it and having him back and having the chance to play against Tiger, and we want to see him play well. It\u2019s only better for our game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fowler himself is hoping the Hero victory will be just the right launchpad for a successful 2018 season \u2013 and maybe that elusive first major.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old has seven top-five results in majors without a win including his incredible 2014 when he was T5-T2-T2-T3 across the four Grand Slams. He also has a relatively modest tally of just four official PGA Tour titles \u2013 hampered by 12 runner-ups and seven thirds. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at winning as your only sense of success, you\u2019re going to deal with failure a lot,\u201d explained Fowler.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of times where you could pick it apart and last year I could have gotten down on myself a handful of times for not getting the job done or not winning more, but it was a fun year.\u00a0Being in contention with your buddies and some of the best players in the world, if you keep doing that trophies will fall into place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the holiday break he will continue his money games against Tiger Woods and others at their Medalist base in Florida. \u201cI think he (Woods) sharpened me up a little bit. I\u2019ve gotten a little scared of how good he was playing at home, thought I needed to start playing a little bit better or something. There\u2019s no better way than putting yourself against guys that you\u2019re going to be playing with, putting yourself in game-time situations.\u201d <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rarely has a top-10 finish seemed so much like a victory. Playing in his ultra-eagerly-awaited first competitive golf tournament since early February, Tiger Woods entered the invitational Hero World Challenge with global expectations on edge but showed there was no need for concern \u2013 at least in the immediate aftermath of the tournament. As Rickie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":7721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andaluciagolf.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}