LEMONT, Ill. – Tiger Woods is turning into quite the trivia buff. During the third round of the Deutsche Bank Championship two weeks ago, he saw a couple of familiar faces as he walked off the 10th tee and approached as if wanting to impart some important information. "Which city sits on two continents?" he said. "And what country has the most lakes?" His favorite golf question: The eight major champions with the letter "z" in their surname.
When it comes to his own trivia, Woods often doesn’t have a clue. He kept track of the score at the BMW Championship, which was all that mattered to him. Woods built such a big lead at Cog Hill with his course-record on Saturday that his only goal for the final round was to break par.
He closed with a 68 and wound up winning by eight shots.
In an era when a three-shot margin is considered comfortable, this was the fourth straight year Woods has won by at least eight, and the 10th time in his PGA Tour career. He was asked if big victories like that gave him additional satisfaction.
"First of all, I did not know that," he said with a smile that suggested he was pleased to find out.
Odds are, he isn’t aware that he tied Sam Snead with his sixth year of six victories or more. To put that in perspective, only one other player over the last 25 years has won six times in a season – Vijay Singh in 2004.
So really, has anything changed about Woods?
He makes winning look ridiculously routine. Because he usually plays only the stronger courses, his adjusted scoring average is 68.06, giving him a 1.26 margin over second place. Such a gap is not unlike Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes – or even Woods in the world ranking, in which he has doubled the lead over Steve Stricker.
So why is Woods so proud of his game? Why does he call this one of his best years when he didn’t win a major?
Only he can appreciate how badly his ligaments were shredded in his left knee. Only he knows the extent of the surgery, not to mention the eight-month recovery that allowed doubts to invade his mind about how quickly he could get back to where he was.
Woods has been saying all summer that he never could have imagined winning so much after such a major surgery. Yet the more he keeps winning, the harder it is to believe him.
"If you would have asked me at the beginning of the year … any of you guys probably wouldn’t have predicted I would have had a year like I did," Woods said Sunday. AP
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