PGA Championship: Tiger Woods show suggests bright future for champion Brooks Koepka
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-13/p ... tion=sport
The atmosphere around the course was electric, the bumper crowd caught up in another vintage PGA Championship performance.
As Tiger Woods pieced together a memorable final round at Bellerive Country Club, golf fans around the world held their breath as the greatest golfer of this generation recaptured the form that saw him dominate the sport for over a decade.
But despite the building excitement, Woods fell agonisingly short of what would have been his 15th major title by just two shots.
Despite finishing second, the extraordinary hype surrounding the 14-time major winner has meant that the result has somewhat overshadowed the achievement of young talent Brooks Koepka — who won his third major title and maiden PGA Championship.
The old adage that nobody remembers who finishes second is almost always born out in reality, but you get the sense that this will be far from the case when the story of the 100th PGA Championship is told.
Woods' second place finish at Bellerive has the potential to go down in history as either the one that got away, or mark the return to the top for golf's greatest asset.
Plenty have been quick to write Woods off, but this performance — coupled with his impressive showing at the British Open in Carnoustie last month — suggests he is still a force to be reckoned with.
"I played hard," Woods said after finishing his final round with a six-under 64 — his best final round at a major. "A bit of a struggle with my game today, but I hung in there."
Finishing two shots behind overall winner Brooks Koepka is not the fairy tale that most spectators in St Louis would have hoped for, but it is a huge step in the right direction for the 14-time major winner and former world number one.
After four back surgeries, you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that Tiger's time had been and gone.
Woods himself referred to his return to the year's first major at the Masters at Augusta as "a miracle".
At the year's final major, he reiterated that claim.
"Oh, God, I didn't even know if I was going to play golf again, so yeah," he said. "I'm just thankful to be here."
He may be thankful to still be playing, but the reality is that this performance hints that Woods is nowhere near finished at the top level, and that all the hard work to get to this point has been worth it.
"I had to kind of figure this out on my own and it's been really hard — a lot harder than people think," he continued, in reference to his comeback from multiple back surgeries to return to a position of fighting it out during the final round of a major. "I'm just very pleased at what I've done so far … going from where I've come from, to now over the last year, it's been pretty cool."
In the frenzy of excitement that greeted Tiger Woods making his final round charge, it is almost easy to forget that Woods did not actually win anything in St. Louis.
When Brooks Koepka secured his maiden PGA Championship with a comfortable one-foot putt on the eighteenth, it was almost an anti-climax after the wild scenes that had greeted the preceding [Woods] group to the gallery.
However, Koepka was immune to the pressure and calmly went about his business. "Other than me, and my team, everybody was rooting for Tiger," he said. "It kind of pushes you to step up your game.
), disagreed with that opinion... So much so that they decided to boycott the contest and not enter.
