Tiger Woods had just finished his latest masterpiece, an eight-stroke victory at the Buick Invitational that tied him with Arnold Palmer at 62 career victories, when he was asked about the possibility of winning his 63rd PGA Tour event in front of the King himself.
"Hopefully I can do it before then," Woods said with no trace of a smile. Granted, the Palmer Invitational is not until March 13-16, and Woods has won five of his last six starts on Tour. But he may enter only one Tour event before then, the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, in which a player must survive six straight matches to win, a crapshoot for anyone.
And yet he expects to win it. He should. He is simply that much better than the rest of the field, which leaves golf with one big question: Does anyone else matter?
Phil Mickelson will play this week at the FBR Open in Phoenix. Ernie Els will start his '08 season at the Euro tour's Dubai Desert Classic, where he'll have to contend with Woods. Will Mickelson or Els or some other player be revealed as the second best of 2008? And does it make any difference anymore?
Woods is so good right now that even some of his peers have begun to admit they don't have a prayer of catching him. He seemed to hit the afterburners when he won the Bridgestone Invitational and Tour Championship by eight strokes apiece last year, kept the pedal down with a mere seven-stroke win at the unofficial Target World Challenge, and got the margin back up to eight again at the Buick. Who cares about the Giants and the Patriots? Tiger Woods is a one-touchdown favorite.
The long-simmering storyline that a rival might rise to challenge him, so intriguing after Mickelson beat him eye-to-eye at the Deutsche Bank last fall, has gone tepid again. Ice cold, actually.
"Everybody says, 'Why isn't there somebody taking Tiger down' or, 'Why isn't there more competition' or whatever," Mark O'Meara said as he headed to the parking lot after shooting an 84 at Torrey Pines on Sunday. "Why don't you just say, 'Hey, this guy is so much better than everybody else, it's ungodly.'"
Mickelson tied for sixth place at the Buick, but for all the heat he put on Woods he may as well not have been there. Mickelson trailed Woods by three strokes after the first round despite playing the easier North Course while Woods toured the South, a much tougher track and the site of this year's U.S. Open. Mickelson was 11 behind through 36 holes. Tiger's A-game plus Phil's congestion and respiratory ills equaled no contest.
But Mickelson, ranked No. 2 in the world, was optimistic after shooting 68-71 on the weekend at Torrey Pines. "I'm a week behind on my game just because I haven't been able to practice," he said, "but as the week wore on I started to play better, I started to feel better, and those two rounds under par on the weekend give me a little bit of momentum heading into Phoenix."
He'll need it. Mickelson missed the cut at the 2007 FBR Open and, aside from going out in 30 on Saturday at the Buick, he showed little spark in his hometown of San Diego.
Vijay Singh also looked ordinary. After failing to record a top-10 finish in his first two starts of the year, he shot 73-68-74-72 at Torrey, 18 shots back of Woods.
The latest jaw-dropping example of Tiger's virtuoso shot-making came early Sunday, on the terrifying par-3 third, when he smoked a 198-yard 4-iron with just enough hook spin to hold its line in a two-club wind and stay where it landed, 20 feet behind the pin.
It was the scariest shot on the course, with anything left and/or long of the green flying over a cliff, and a left pin. Even Woods was impressed, he said later.
