Golf story by Carl Anders, Tue, 07 Mar 2006 03:48:00 GMT


MIAMI - Tiger Woods has shown time and again this year that a champion sticks to the task always and something inevitably gives way even when things are not going the way you want them to. Further evidence that this is Tiger's year was on hand in the Ford Championship at Doral on Sunday.

David Toms had all but wrapped up the game when something of the situation he was in dawned on the 18th. A nervous Toms skewed his 60-foot putt to the bottom of the green and then contrived to miss the next one thus giving Woods a narrow opening. It was enough for Tiger to squeeze through and he looks in fine fettle for the Masters.

"I wasn't even nervous all day because I'm trying to catch the guy. So then all of a sudden I've got a 100-foot putt all the way across the green, big break, and I'm nervous because I'm just trying to two-putt because I think I might have a chance," Toms admitted after the heart-breaking loss. "That's my mistake. I don't usually do things like that. But if I had been looking at (leaderboards) all day, then maybe I would have felt that way all the way through the back nine."

On the other hand, Woods said he never looked at the boards as a rule, "No, I don't understand that concept, because it dictates what you do or what you might have to do to play either more aggressively or more conservatively and try to win," he said. "Once David made his mistake, I just said anything in the back bleachers, right bleacher, just anything over there to the right and over the water is all I had to do. I was just trying to play for five. I wasn't even trying to make par."

More Sporting Stuff