Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

Thomas Carlyle

The 92nd PGA Championship is being played at Whistling Straights, a Pete Dye links style course in Haven, WI.  The course is a bit over 100 miles from Chicago's Northern Suburbs.

 

I did watch a number of golfers from the bleaches on the 18th green. This is a very difficult 500 yard par 4.  The highly elevated green is surrounded by a variety of particularly nasty bunkers. I saw Davis Love III's head disappear into a deep pot bunker and the ball sailing out to about 10 feet -- too far for Love to salvage par.  

Woods played the hole in a business like manner, laying up safely in the middle of a landing zone and hitting the dead center of the green, about 20 feet from the pin.  Woods looked quite good physically (as always) and was warmly greeted by the crowd, to whom he smiled and tipped his hat.

Since Woods started on the back nine, he was at that time 2 under (but would subsequently lose a shot to par on the difficult second hole), finishing at 1 under.

In contrast, Vijay Singh hit a spectacular drive to a particularly narrow landing zone which appeals only to the supremely confident, the foolish, or the desperate.  Singh was unable to cash in after a short iron failed to land close enough to the pin, leaving him over 20 feet to the cup.  Both Woods and Singh tapped in for pars.

Woods has succeeded in lowering expectations to the extent that simply good golf will now be seen as excellent.  And good for a leading pro is, in fact, a level of excellence that few will attain in their lifetimes in any endeavor.  

At the press conference the night before, having been asked another variant of the ubiquitous "are you washed up," Woods conceded that he was one of the worst golfers on the planet right now.

But then pepped up and said, "but I could very likely beat YOU," looking the sports writer in the eye with a smile.

And frankly, the notion that Woods has fallen from #1 to the hundredth best golfer in the world is largely based on missing a cut and a bad week at  Firestone.  

In fact, for the three majors of 2010, those who have won have shown no consistency.  And those that have shown some consistency, like Paul Casey and Lee Westwood, have shown no signs of being able to win. (Woods has 2 fourth place finishes - at the Masters and US Open -- and frankly, I had forgotten that he had performed that well given the current media sentiment)

Prediction is a matter of separating trend from noise.  A couple of data points are insufficient to tell us much, especially when considering something like professional golf.  So, to those that are anxious to declare Woods finished, the following quote comes to mind:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy