And what a fine day it's been, as Tiguh was bounced from the World Match Play Championship in the second round by Nick Watney. Woods barely hung on in the first round yesterday, winning 1 and 0 against a Spaniard I had never heard of and I follow golf closely.
After the first day of matches, "Golf Central" on the shameless Golf Channel devoted its first 15 minutes of coverage to Woods' match, then five minutes to the other 31 matches. That's a pretty good representation of the Golf Channel's basic formula: coverage of the world's top 63 players combined equals one-third of the coverage given to Woods. I imagine the same script will be followed today, after which, with Woods out of the tournament they'll be forced to pay at least some attention now to the 16 golfers left still contending for the title.
Woods had a putt of less than 6 feet on the 18th hole to tie the match with Watney and send it into extra holes, but missed badly. You could almost hear the wind go out of Nick Faldo and the rest of the Tiger worshippers when he missed, who were so sure their hero was going to sink it. Even when Woods is 50 years old, they'll still be praying and pretending that he's still the Tiger of circa 2000.
After he missed a putt on 17, the supposedly "reformed" Woods let out a loud "goddammit" followed by what sounded like an f-bomb though it was hard to tell for sure. Another interesting tidbit -- Dottie Pepper, who was following the Woods-Watney pairing, was asked if the fans were overwhelmingly for Woods as they were yesterday against the obscure player from Spain. Pepper said it was about 50-50. Watney is a fine young American player but hardly yet a fan favorite. That his following was as loud as Tiger's is more proof that Woods isn't nearly as popular as the corporate media pretends, not that it will change the Golf Channel's absurdly over the top Tiger-centric agenda any.
