Gone but not forgotten: Tiger Woods’ putting woes continue to fascinate

Tiger Woods may be back on the practice range in Jupiter, Fla., but he and his putting woes were still on many folks’ minds as the third round of the Accenture Match Play Championship got under way without him in the Arizona desert.

Despite Woods’ sudden departure from the tourney he has won three times, the shock waves from his missed five-footer on the 18th green on Thursday continued to reverberate a day later across Jack Nicklaus’ Ritz-Carlton Golf Club. Nick Watney (the stunned recipient of Woods’ largesse in the form of that whiffed birdie putt that would have extended the match) and the rest of the surviving field may not have had Tiger on the brain, but that made 16 golfers not fascinated by the 14-time major champ’s short-game shortcomings.

Much of the rest of the golfing world continued to wonder what in the name of Scotty Cameron was wrong with Woods’ flat stick. For sure, Woods’ failure to convert putts that used to be automatic was topic No. 1 on Golf Channel’s "Morning Drive" and pre-game shows Friday, and promised to be so again on the network’s "State of the Game" wrap-up Friday night.

Tiger Woods reacts after losing his Accenture Match Play Championship contest to Nick Watney on Thursday (Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

And while it was Woods’ final goof on 18 Thursday that stunned Watney as much as it did the flabbergasted Golf Channel broadcasters, Dottie Pepper noted that Tiger had made a hash of the greens for much of his second round.

"The last putt is always going to be the one that’s seared most into people’s memories," Pepper said on GC’s Friday a.m. telecast. "But if you go back all the way to the latter part of the front nine, he three-whacked it on seven [from 20 feet]."

Indeed, Woods’ revamped swing looked solid to Pepper, who pointed out it was the golfer’s inability to close Watney out that sealed his fate. "He’s hitting the ball beautifully," she said. "He hit the shots that he really needed to hit....He just didn’t finish the deal."

Pepper, whose putting average ranked ninth in 2004, her final year on the LPGA Tour, believes -- like the golfer himself -- that Woods’ putting problems required just a minor "tweak." She offered some Tiger-speak when she said that he "doesn’t get what Scotty Cameron calls the ‘toe flow’ of a putt" (causing his putter face to shut, impeding release, and resulting in a "weak block"). But Pepper said Woods must relocate the gut feel he had in his heyday, when he "could close his eyes and know it’s perfect," as colleague Frank Nobilo noted in his pre-game remarks.

"Putting needs to be instinctive. While it’s very easy to go technical, to look at high-speed film," said Pepper, "you have to feel putts before you can make them. And right now that’s just not happening."

In a bit of pre-tourney prescience, another Golf Channel associate, Brandel Chamblee, agreed with Pepper’s assessment.

"Since he's come back, he has said that he is trying to change his release point on his putter," Chamblee told reporters on a conference call on the eve of Wednesday’s first round of play. "When you see someone go from [visualizing his] putting stroke...to talking about a release point on a putter, which I'm not even sure I know what that means, that tells me that they have become mechanical in the whole process."

Tiger Woods may be long gone from Dove Mountain but he remains an object of intense interest, despite -- or, perhaps, because of -- his two-year-plus official losing streak. That curiosity will continue, according to NBC’s Dan Hicks, into the foreseeable future.

"You know what, it's crazy....Even with all of the problems and the struggles, people still can't take their eye off him," Hicks said during the Tuesday teleconference. "I think it's absolutely amazing that [people] are still watching, still as intent on seeing if he can just dig himself out of this hole."

At this point, it would seem to be more a question of whether Woods can even get it to the hole. Perhaps the golf world will have an answer to that and other queries when Tiger tees it up in next week’s Honda Classic. Stay tuned....