Kiawah Island, S.C. - The search this year began, as it does each year, in the pine canyons of Augusta. Then it went global, fanning out first to California granola country and later to England, where the golf courses resemble bombing ranges.
Golf has looked high for signs of major-championship life in Tiger Woods.
And now it looks low, as in low country. Woods' last chance of 2012 to win one of the only four tournaments big enough to define him arrives Thursday here, where the paspalum grass meets the sea.
Should he fail to capture the PGA Championship — online oddsmakers at least have not lost faith, making him an 8-to-1 favorite — Woods will go a fourth year without adding to his cache of 14 majors. Jack Nicklaus will have another entire fall and winter to sleep peacefully with his record 18.
Nothing, not getting up in the morning, not winning a grand-slam golf tournament, comes as easily at 36 as at 26.
"Yeah, there are more players with a chance now. The fields are so much more deep than they used to be," Woods said Tuesday afternoon, in his media-room warm-up for the week.
But, noting that Nicklaus was 46 when he won his last major, the 1986 Masters, Woods confidently asserted, "I've got plenty of time."
As Woods spoke Tuesday, thunder boomed overhead and rain beat heavily on the canvas roof of the media room. The portents were for a sodden week of golf. Soft conditions combined with the different feel of the local paspalum grass should test Woods' touch around the greens, one of the more suspect aspects of his game currently.
Brandt Snedeker, who played with Woods in the final round of the British Open, told USA Today: "Everybody out here on the Tour knows he's back. Once he gets that short game straightened out, when he gets that putter back to the way he's used to putting, it's going to be very, very tough to beat him."
The Ocean Course is a Pete Dye attempt to improve upon a perfectly good beach, meaning there are plenty of odd angles and humpbacked greens and harsh penalties for straying off the fairway. Woods has fared rather poorly on Dye tracks — a tie for 28th at the 2010 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits and just one top-10 finish at TPC Sawgrass in the past decade.
Still, he said, "I do like [Dye courses], because of the fact that you have to think. You can't just go up there and swing away and hit it and go find it. You've got to really think about what you're going to do and how you're going to do it."
By any sane metric, Woods has had a bountiful season. He has won three times on the PGA Tour, more than anyone. He leads in money winnings, scoring average and FedEx points. With a victory here this week, he has the potential to reclaim the No. 1 world ranking he lost in 2010 when in the process of rebuilding his life and swing.
But you don't get to be Tiger Woods by simply winning a few run-of-the-mill pro tournaments. Knocking down flagsticks in Orlando in March is not the stuff of great video-game imagery.
Winning majors, and a pursuit of Nicklaus' legacy, is the Woods watermark. Since winning the 2008 U.S. Open on one leg, however, he has let every big one get away.
He has stammered on his closing statements in this year's majors. Tied for the lead after two rounds of the U.S. Open, Woods shot 8 over on the weekend. The British Open literally brought him to his knees on Sunday, as he assumed that position while trying to extricate himself from a bunker that eventually cost him a crushing triple bogey. Overall, he has been 13 over on his six weekend rounds at the majors this year.
"Things have progressed, but still, not winning a major championship doesn't feel very good," he said.
Other topics raised Tuesday ranged from the ideal (On looking forward to competing in the Olympics when golf returns to the docket in 2016, Woods said, "I hopefully will be able to qualify. I'll be 40 years old at the time. It'll be exciting to represent our country like that and go down to Brazil and do something that hasn't been [done] in a long time." Golf's last Olympic hurrah was 1904.) to the frivolous (Phil Mickelson is a member of a group set to buy the San Diego Padres. Woods, who is approaching $100 million in just PGA Tour winnings, was asked if he might want to buy into a team someday. "Absolutely. I just need a lot more money," he joked. "My teams are the Lakers, Dodgers and the Raiders, so I've got to play really well.")
More pressing is the need to re-invest in the business of winning majors.
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