Tiger Woods went 10 weeks and four days without hitting a golf shot that mattered, and it hardly showed Thursday at the Target World Challenge in Thousand Oaks, Calif., when he struck just about everything where he was aiming.
Until he got to the final hole.
Woods pulled his approach into the hazard on the 18th hole and finished with a double bogey for a 3-under 69, leaving him in a pack of players one shot behind Jim Furyk in the final tournament of the year.
“It’s frustrating the way it ended because it was a good round of golf,” Woods said.
The only regrets were failing to birdie two par 5s on the back nine at Sherwood Country Club because of poor pitches, and making a mess of the final hole. Otherwise, he figures his first competitive round since Sunday at the Presidents Cup could have been a 65 without too much stress.
But that’s true for many of the 16 players invited to his year-end bonanza.
Furyk, who had not played since the PGA Grand Slam of Golf in Bermuda on Oct. 17, was pleasantly surprised how he recovered from a shaky opening tee shot.
Masters champion Zach Johnson (69) came on strong down the stretch, with back-to-back birdies and an unlikely scramble on the par-5 16th. He hit what he called a “chunk-push” with his 3-wood into the water, took a penalty drop that landed on shredded bark, dumped that one into a greenside bunker and holed it for a routine par.
Williamson leads by two.
Lee Williamson birdied two of his last three holes for a 7-under 65 and a two-stroke lead at the Australian Open in Sydney.
Williamson, a 28-year-old former collegiate player at Purdue, took over the lead late in the day, nearly six hours after Robert Allenby’s 67 had put the Australian into a share of the lead.
Rock solid.
England’s Robert Rock shot a 2-under 70 to take a one-stroke lead over South Africa’s Charl Schwartzel, Alex Haindl and Ulrich van den Berg in the South African Open in Paarl.
