PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland—The host of this week’s British Open does not lack for challenges. Like most good links courses, Royal Portrush has its share of fescue grass, pot bunkers and uneven lies. But for Tiger Woods, none of those features are likely to affect him quite as dramatically as a bit of cool air wafting in from the Atlantic Ocean.
At age 43, the Masters champion has proven he can still beat anyone on his best days. He can handle players 20 years younger and players who drive the ball 20 yards farther. But put Woods in weather that requires him to break out the sweater vest and people begin to talk about him in worrisome terms.
“The biggest hurdle for him is if it gets cold,” said Notah Begay III, the Golf Channel analyst and longtime friend of Woods. “Anybody that has a sore back knows that it just doesn’t feel as good in the cold.”
It is not quite winter in Northern Ireland. Playing temperatures appear likely to range from the 50s to the low 60s, with intermittent rain. But for Woods, who has had four back surgeries, Portrush in July might as well be Lambeau Field in December.
His major championship season so far has seen two starkly different versions of him. The balmy-air edition won the green jacket, instantly reviving talk of him one day breaking Jack Nickalus’s record for major championships. With 15, Woods needs three more to tie Nicklaus.
Then he showed up in New York for the PGA Championship, with unseasonably cold weather to start the week. He practiced in a wool ski hat, said he felt sick by midweek and missed the cut.
On a chilly week at Pebble Beach last month, Woods was at times visibly uncomfortable at the U.S. Open, where he finished tied for 21st. “When it’s cold like this, everything is achy,” he said then.
The PGA Tour does not record weather information, but an analysis of local temperature data on every day he has played a tournament round since the start of 2017 offers a rough indication of how it has affected him.
In tournaments in which the average midpoint of the daytime temperature range has been 75 degrees or above, Woods has two wins, including at the Masters in April, and an average finish of sixth place. During that span, not once in such conditions has he finished outside the top 25.
When the weather is neither cool nor hot, the same can often be said of Woods. Between 65 and 74 degrees, he has posted an average finish of 24th place, with one missed cut.
When the extra clothing layers come out, his scores tend to go up. In average temperatures below 65 degrees since the start of 2017, Woods has an average finish of 46th place, with three missed cuts. That’s not counting the 2018 Ryder Cup, when Woods lost all four matches for the U.S. on a 56-degree weekend in France.
“It’s just part of, unfortunately, dealing with the procedures I’ve had, and being a little bit older,” Woods said Tuesday. “It just doesn’t move quite as fast when it’s a little bit cooler.”
In 2015, after his first back surgery, Woods withdrew from a tournament in San Diego on the first day, saying his glutes had “deactivated” when a brisk fog blew in from the ocean.
That he remains similarly sensitive shows that his body—while healthy enough to allow for a spectacular comeback—is still fragile. He has treated it that way, playing only 10 competitive rounds since the Masters. He hasn’t played since the U.S. Open and said Tuesday his game is “not quite as sharp as I’d like to have it.”
Woods’s cooler-air issues could undercut one of the biggest reasons for optimism about his chances of winning more majors: the British Open’s favorability for older players.
Typically on the shorter side, Open courses demand less power than most and more often reward the mental skills that come with age, namely playing through wind and rain and understanding links golf.
“There is an art to playing links golf,” Woods said. “It’s not, ‘OK, I have 152 yards, bring out the automatic 9-iron and hit it 152.’ Here, 152 could be a little bump-and-run pitching wedge. It could be a chip 6-iron. It could be a lot of different things.”
But with links golf often comes links weather, and that maybe more than anything is what Woods will have to overcome in the years ahead. Of all the majors, his longest drought is here, having won the last of his three Claret Jugs in 2006.
A forecast for the Open issued by Britain’s National Weather Service on Tuesday predicted clouds and short bursts of heavy rain and wind for the first round Thursday, with a high temperature of 63 degrees. For the rest of the tournament, the forecast predicted only “changeable conditions…confidence low in any details at this stage.”
The only near-certainty is that this will be a chillier Open than last year, when Woods—with high temperatures reaching his 75-and-up happy zone on three of the four days—moved into a tie for the lead on Sunday and finished tied for sixth. Before his arrival at Portrush, Woods practiced near his Florida home, where temperatures have been in the upper 80s and low 90s.
“He’s going to have a pretty rude awakening,” Begay said.
Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiger-woods-has-a-new-nemesis-its-called-a-cold-front-11563361202
2019-07-17 11:00:00Z
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