Tiger Woods’ putter abandoned him during the first leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs this week. Over the four rounds, Woods’ strokes gained: putting stats bore out that he lost nearly five strokes to the field average on the greens alone at The Northern Trust.
Ranking 79th out of 80 players who made the cut on the greens, Woods said following his third round that he was having trouble reading the greens and seeing his lines.
“I’m just not seeing my lines,” he said. “It’s just one of those things where I’m struggling seeing the lines. The pace has been okay, not great, but my feel is just a little bit off because whether I’m seeing high lines or low lines, they are just not quite dialed in yet.”
Speaking on Golf Channel following the round, Brandel Chamblee offered his diagnoses as to what is plaguing Woods on the greens.
“One of the reasons sport is so cruel to middle-aged men is they begin to lose their eyesight,” Chamblee said. “Doesn’t matter how good your eyes were earlier in your life, you lose the ability to focus.
“And when you are extremely near-sighted to the extent that Tiger Woods was — and even though he had a touch-up — you still lose that ability to focus quite the way you did when you were younger. Tiger Woods talks a lot or has talked a lot about not being able to see the lines and not being able to get the feels. He’s had incredibly inconsistent putting this week.”
Woods finished in a tie for 40th. He currently sits in 25th place in the FedEx Cup standings heading into this week’s Dell Technologies Open.
