Tiger Woods’ opening round of the Dell Technologies Open got off to an interesting start on Friday. Rarely, if ever, do we see professional golfers head to the first tee without a clear gameplan of what they’re planning to do, but that’s what appeared to happen to Woods.
Only that wasn’t the case. After going through all the pleasantries, scorecard exchanges and golf ball identification, Woods went through his pre-shot routine only to stand over the ball and realize something wasn’t right.
“That was pretty funny, actually, because I thought it was a 3-wood out. Joey had put the wrong head cover on from the range,” Woods told PGATour.com. “I had a 5-wood out, which I put down there, and I can’t hit it that far in the wind, I need a 3-wood. I went back to 3-wood, that’s why it looked like I switched, because I realized I had the wrong club in my hand.”
Sound quality is not great but here’s Tiger explaining his headcover snafu prior to his opening tee shot @DellTechChamp pic.twitter.com/69wxxNQGdU
— Mike McAllister (@PGATOUR_mikemc) August 31, 2018
Whether or not the headcover snafu affected Woods’ mental state or threw him off can only be answered by one man, Tiger, but he wouldn’t blame LaCava for the swing that followed.
Woods pulled his tee shot low and left into a hazard that ran up the left side of the par-4 10th hole leading to an opening bogey. Woods would go on to add two more bogeys before getting his first circle on the card on the par-4 17th.
“I was 3-over early and didn’t have a whole lot going on,” Woods said. “But I hung in there. And 18, 1, 2, 4, there’s some birdieable holes there. If you could play those holes 4-under par, I’d turn this whole round around. I made a few birdies there, which was nice. Couldn’t quite keep the momentum going throughout, but I felt if I kept the momentum going, I could have finished under par today.”
Woods shot 1-under par on his incoming nine holes to post 1-over par 72 on the day. He enters the weekend seven shots back of the first-round leader, Justin Rose.
