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No Tiger Woods? No problem for us players.
Sure, next week's Players is the first significant (not the same as major) championship in a long time without Tiger, but we're already over it. We're not going to give him a second thought — except when the Tiger-obsessed media grill us about him, which I expect to happen endlessly from Monday through Wednesday.
But once the tournament begins, nobody will even mention his name, which is going to be a big problem for the folks at Golf Channel. Without their franchise player, I don't know what they're going to talk about.
I admit I was as surprised as anyone that Tiger had knee surgery right after the Masters. The big question is how the injury is tied to his swing. As hard as he swings, there's a lot of resistance on that left knee. I saw a picture of Tiger hitting that helicopter, hold-on cut shot out of the pine straw on 13 on Masters Sunday, spinning out on his left leg, and the knee didn't seem to bother him then.
The Players is the tournament that, next to any of the majors, I always want to win because of the perks (five-year exemption) and the purse ($9 million, with $1.7 million to the winner). Plus, it's the best field of the year by a mile. If you're looking to move up in the World Ranking, the Players is the week to try to do it.
Most of the changes they've made to the Stadium course are fantastic, and playing in May instead of March is a big improvement because the weather is better. The gigantic new clubhouse at TPC Sawgrass is gorgeous, but for $100 million, or whatever the Tour spent on it, it should be.
My only complaint is with the greens. No major championship is held on bermuda greens, so if we want the Players to be the fifth major, why are we playing on bermuda? I don't think the greens will ever be as good as when they were overseeded bermuda. The real reason they made the change wasn't to make the greens better for the Players, it was to make them better year-round. When you're charging the public close to $400 a round, you have to have decent greens. Before, the greens were good for only about two months a year — the weeks before, during and after the tournament.
Personally, I don't think bermuda is as true a surface as an overseeded bermuda or bentgrass or even poa annua that's cut down and rolled. From a player's standpoint, the greens take away from the championship a little bit.
• With Tiger out of the picture — and that's the last time I'll mention him — Jim Furyk is my pick to win. He usually plays well at Sawgrass, and his game has come around at last.
He finally went back to the style of putter he made all his money with, a face-balanced mallet. That club fits his stroke. He's always been a square-to-square putter, but for some reason tried a heel-shafted putter like Phil Mickelson's, which is the opposite of what Furyk's stroke is about. I wasn't surprised that Jim struggled. Now he's back to the mallet, at home — he has a house nearby — and threatening to win.
• A lot of guys can chase it onto three of the par-5 holes, so I think a solid putter and iron player, like Scott Verplank, has a good chance of winning. You have to work the ball into a lot of fairways, so length isn't much of an advantage. Sawgrass is a Pete Dye course and not unlike Harbour Town — it's narrow in spots, and you have to keep your ball in play. I think I just described Verplank's game.
