NEWTOWN SQUARE – Well, that was a bummer compared to yesterday. Tiger Woods gave up the little ground he gained Friday with a bogey-bogey finish en route to an even-par 70. The overnight co-leader will enter the weekend five behind leader Xander Schauffele. And now, deep thoughts with Tiger Tracker …
• Woof. That deep enough for you? I’m not going to crush a guy for shooting even par but the finish was just so deflating. A two-putt birdie at 16 soon gave way to a missed green-lip-out combo at 17 and a three-putt at 18. His first 16 holes were far from exciting, but they were good enough. His closing bogeys threw away five hours of hard work.
• Woods started his post-round media availability with his putting, calling the story of his day “very simple.” “I didn’t make any putts,” he said. “I hit a lot of beautiful putts that were on top of the edge and then obviously hit a couple bad ones on the last hole, but looked like all the putts were going to go in, but they didn’t go in today.”
• Fair. He had a number of near-misses and two lip-outs. But focusing on the putting misses the real story about his proximity to the hole. He went from third in the field in proximity in Round 1 (24’5”) to 54th in Round 2 (37’4”). He just didn’t have the number of short, quality opportunities that he had on Thursday. With Aronimink further softened by overnight rains, tournament officials cut a number of back-edge pins, which Tiger acknowledged immediately after the remarks about his putting.
Full-field scores from BMW Championship
“As soft as the golf course was, they had a lot of back pins and I couldn’t get back there, couldn’t skip the ball back there,” he said. “You don’t want to go long. You don’t want to carry it past the hole and skip over the back. It was a difficult task to try and flight one to get it back there without, you know, hitting it over the back.” And that was the real story Friday.
• The good news is, he’s far from out of it. He’s five back to enter the weekend, and Aronimink is going to stay plenty soft. He’s already gone low once this week, and he’ll have two opportunities to do it again. Still, he’s aware that it might take four low scores to win this week, not just three. He definitely feels like he left a lot out there today, and with good reason.
“That round today was easily 6 or 7 under par,” he said. “It turned into even par which is not what I needed to do today. Everyone is going low and birdies should be had.”
• Something to watch this weekend – Tiger’s performance on the non-4s. Aronimink has just two par-5s and he’s played them in 5 under so far, with three birdies and an eagle. On the flip side, he’s played the course’s difficult par-3s, three of which measure longer than 215 yards, in 3 over. Length, however, is no excuse for why he’s missed the green at the short par-3 fifth both days.
“Well, making a bogey with a sand wedge in my hand is not very good,” he conceded. “Dumping the ball in the bunker at 17 also is not very good. I’ve got to hit better shots on the par 3s, for sure.”
• One last thing, Tiger didn’t have media availability Wednesday, and his play got all the attention on Thursday. But a disappointing round of 70 finally led to Woods getting asked the Colin Kaepernick-Nike question. More on that here.
