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Tiger Woods watches from the fourth green during the second round of the Memorial golf tournament on Friday in Dublin, Ohio. Darron Cummings/Associated Press

 

Tiger Woods was his usual noncommittal self Sunday after he finished up his final round at the Memorial, his first PGA Tour tournament since February, saying only that he needs “more reps” to get his game back into shape before the PGA Championship at Harding Park in San Francisco.

Whether that means private reps or another PGA Tour event remains to be seen. There are two tournaments between now and the PGA Championship, this week’s 3M Open in Minnesota and the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational in Tennessee. Woods will not be at the former and has yet to commit to the latter (he must give his answer by Friday). Woods has won the WGC tournament a record eight times, though all of those titles came when the tournament was played at Firestone in Ohio. He’s never played competitively at TPC Southwind in Memphis, which has hosted the tournament since 2018.

Woods and just about everyone else struggled with the conditions at Muirfield Village on Sunday, with wind and a baked-out course making life miserable. His final-round 76 left him at 6 over par for the tournament and in a tie for 40th, which was something of an accomplishment considering his infamously wonky back started acting up on him during Friday’s second round, when he made the cut on the number.

Because of his back, Woods shut things down after the Genesis Invitational in February, when he finished last among players who made the cut. He wasn’t at the Players Championship, which saw one round completed before it was abandoned because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and then skipped the PGA Tour’s first four fan-free tournaments upon its restart, playing only in a charity match with Phil Mickelson and NFL stars Tom Brady and Peyton Manning.

“I competed and played again,” he told reporters after his round Sunday. “It’s been a while. It was nice to get my feet wet and compete and play again. Tough, tough conditions to start out my first week back. But it was good to get the feel and the flow of competing again.”

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Woods admitted to struggling with his putter on Muirfield Village’s bentgrass greens, where he lost 1.3 shots to the field for the week.

“I didn’t feel comfortable playing break,” Woods said. “I’ve been in Florida playing Bermuda (grass greens) and seeing minimal break, come out here and playing 10, 12 feet of break was a bit different and something I’m going to have to get used to.”

Should Woods agree to play the WGC event in Memphis, it would mean tournaments on consecutive weekends for the 44-year-old, something he has been loath to do in recent years. Last season, the year of his remarkable Masters victory, he played two straight events only once, and that was early in the year. Plus, there’s the fact that he’s played a tournament that immediately precedes a major only 12 times over his career, though all 12 of those tournaments preceded the PGA Championship.

“For me, I’ve had to try and maximize every tournament start since I’ve had my last procedure, back procedure,” Woods said Friday. “I’ve had to manage that. My levels of play – I really haven’t played that much since then. I think that unfortunately over the last few years that I’ve been used to taking long breaks, long time off and having to build my game and build it to a level where it’s at a tour level at home and then come out and play, and play a few tournaments here and there, so that’s something I have unfortunately been accustomed to.”

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