Tigers Knee

BETHESDA, Maryland (AFP) — Tiger Woods is still staying off his surgically repaired left knee, and expects to be on crutches for another couple of weeks, the golf superstar said in a conference call on Monday.

"As of right now, I'm in a brace, straight leg brace," he said. "Letting everything kind of calm down and quiet down for three weeks post-op.

"Then from there I can start some weight bearing and then gradually start putting a little bit of weight on this thing and flexing it.

"I will be on crutches for those three weeks. Basically, non-weight bearing," said Woods, who had reconstructive surgery on the torn ligament in his left knee on June 24.

Woods said he wouldn't be able to attend the PGA Tour event he hosts which which starts here on Thursday, with South Korean K.J. Choi as defending champion.

"Flying, unfortunately, swells up my leg pretty good," he said. "When I flew home from the procedure, it ballooned up a little bit."

Woods said the operation was an ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) reconstruction of my left knee.

"They did take a graft, basically a tendon out of my right hamstring, and implemented it into my left knee and made it to my new ACL and they fixed a little bit of cartilage damage I had in there, and that was about it."

Woods won the US Open in a thrilling playoff over Rocco Mediate earlier this month despite discomfort, both from the torn knee ligament and from a double stress fracture in his left tibia.

Days later he announced he would have surgery and miss the rest of the season.

Woods admitted he didn't enjoy watching the season go by.

"Being laid up here and watching it on TV is really no fun. But those are the cards right now, and I just have to deal with it," he said.

Woods said he expected his knee to be better than it had been in years once he had completed his rehabilitation.

"I've been trying to adjust over the years to alleviate some of the stress I do put on my left leg.

"The doctors have assured me that my long-term health will be a hell of a lot better than it's been over the past decade. I'm really looking forward to that, and not having pain after I'm playing and while I'm playing."

Nobody Could Topple Tiger

San Diego – As the leaders made the turn for the final round of the 108th United States Open Sunday, fans and the media alike were having a hard time discerning a clear narrative for the championship. And at the end of the day, you understood why: the drama wouldn’t be resolved for another day.

The overnight storyline was clear, of course: after an erratically thrilling third round on a bum knee, Tiger Woods seemed poised to nab his 14th and perhaps most inspiring major.

But the script doctors appeared to have their work cut out for them after Woods once again made a disaster of the first hole, double-bogeying it for the third time. Dropping another stroke on the par-four second hole, Woods had turned the lead over to the unlikely but irrepressible journeyman, Rocco Mediate, a five-time winner on the PGA tour.

But even if the affable Mediate has long been a crowd favorite, he probably was not first on anyone’s list of players primed to give Woods the head-to-head challenge the world of golf has been waiting for.

For one thing, at 45, he would be the oldest Open winner. For another, he just didn’t seem the steely kind of guy who won majors. He seemed too ordinary, too easy going. Currently ranked 126th on the PGA Tour money list, he’d come into the Open having made the cut in only half the tournaments he’d entered in 2008. A winner of only four PGA events (his last was six years ago, at the Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic), he has never been a member of the Ryder or Presidents Cup teams.

“Once again,” he said to the media after tying Woods at one under par for the championship, forcing an 18-hole playoff Monday at 9 a.m. “I bet you’re surprised to see me here again.”

True that.

The guys in the media tent had their money on one of the overseas players to challenge Woods. Lee Westwood seemed the likeliest candidate. Starting the day at two under and paired with Woods, the Englishman had been playing the best, steadiest golf of the championship. If he lacked Woods flashes of brilliance, he also eschewed his frequent blunders, leading the field in pars with 54 for the championship.

As he and Woods made the turn, Westwood enjoyed a one-shot lead. After bogeying No. 10, Woods and Mediate were now in a three-way tie. But then he went and hooked a 3-wood into the hazard and lost his ball on the 615-yard par-5 13th, putting himself two back of the leaders.

Despite bouncing back with a birdie on No. 14, Westwood’s steady-as-it-goes play would not be enough to catch Mediate on the closing holes. Like Woods, he would need to sink a dicey birdie putt on No. 18 to force a playoff. Unlike Woods, he didn’t make it.

“It’s sickening not to be in the playoff tomorrow,” he said afterward. “I was aware that I had the lead after nine or 10, I guess. But a lot of strange things happen in the last few hole of major championships, as they did today.”

The likelihood of greater strangeness seemed to auger well for the Australian Geoff Ogilvy, the last man standing amid multiple meltdowns two years ago at Winged Foot. But the 2006 Open winner, who would get to within one shot of the lead by the seventh hole, had his own collapse Sunday, snapping at his caddy after missing an easy three-footer on no. 16 and nearly hooking the ball into the canyon on no. 17.

So it went for much of the leader board. Nobody seemed inclined to challenge Woods. Two-time Open champion Ernie Els appeared to have a shot – until he triple-bogeyed No. 15. The few players to step up and turn in below-par final rounds – e.g., Carl Pettersson (68), Eric Axley (69), Stewart Cink (67), Retief Goosen (67), and Heath Slocum (65, the lowest round in a U.S. Open since 2003) – had started the day too far back of the leaders to become any kind of factor Sunday.

And so it will be left to the unlikeliest challenger to reckon with Woods Monday.

“Mr. Woods, Mr. Woods,” Mediate had shouted from amid the media scrum after Tiger’s sensational Saturday round. “I have a question for you. Are you out of your mind?”

Now the question is, is Mediate out of his, going toe-to-toe with Tiger?

“Sometimes you got to be careful what you wish for, I guess,” he said Sunday.
Thomas Hackett is a freelance writer whose work has appeared previously on www.usopen.com.

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Golf: Sorenstam, Nicklaus not surprised by Woods' U.S. Open win

By Jay Drew
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 06/17/2008 01:06:22 AM MDT

LEHI - While arguably the greatest male golfer in history was storming back to win his 14th major championship in a U.S. Open playoff Monday afternoon, the man formerly believed to be the greatest was boarding a helicopter at Thanksgiving Point Golf Club for a quick trip to a golf course community project in Heber City.
The greatest female golfer ever was finishing the last few holes of the Champions Challenge pro-am at the layout just west of Interstate 15 in northern Utah County.
Jack Nicklaus and Annika Sorenstam missed seeing Tiger Woods' heroics at Torrey Pines Golf Club on live television, thanks to their commitment to NBC TV golf analyst Johnny Miller's annual golf get-together, but still got hole-by-hole updates of the sudden-death win over journeyman Rocco Mediate.
"Sounds like it couldn't have been more exciting," Sorenstam said. "I am sure it made for great television."
It was the second time in as many days that Sorenstam missed seeing her good friend - the LPGA Hall of Famer and Tiger famously exchange text messages - pull off some of the greatest clutch shots in modern golf history.
Sorenstam said she was on a Salt Lake City-bound airplane on Sunday evening trying to get reports from her sister, Charlotta, when Woods was lining up the 12-foot birdie putt that he eventually made to force Monday's playoff. However, the connection broke up and she
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didn't learn the result until she landed.
"You can tell he's in pain [from watching the highlight shows]," she said. "I mean, he's about to fall over on every other shot. But he lives for the majors, and you can see it."
Sorenstam said she believed that even with the knee that was surgically repaired in Park City throbbing, Woods was going to win Monday's playoff.
"I think anybody would have favored Tiger," she said. "He's Tiger."
Ironically, while Nicklaus and Sorenstam were playing in Miller's event, the former BYU golf star was calling the U.S. Open playoff for NBC.
Nicklaus, a Champions Challenge regular, said Monday he is as impressed as everybody else over how Woods performed at the U.S. Open despite obvious knee pain.
"It's pretty amazing, what he's doing," Nicklaus said. "I don't know any other way to describe it. By all rights, he doesn't look like he should be there, with what has happened to him. He's unbelievable. I am amazed watching him."
But is Nicklaus rooting for Tiger to get closer to his record of 18 majors?
"Not particularly, no," he said, then added: "I can't root against him, because I like him, [but] nobody ever wants their records to be broken, obviously."

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