Tiger Woods made a solid start to the PGA Championship 2024 with a round of 72, but it became apparent early on on the second day of the tournament that the cut would be out of reach for the golf legend. A triple bogey on the second hole was followed by a bogey on the third hole. A second triple bogey followed on the next hole, meaning Woods’ chances of making the cut were already buried. Tiger actually played a good round the rest of the day with two birdies and two bogeys. He even recorded another birdie on the last hole to bring the tournament to a conciliatory close.
PGA Championship 2024 – Woods: “Just kept making mistakes”
Q. How would you characterize your week?
TIGER WOODS: The week, it was a great week being here, being here at Valhalla, and unfortunately my scores did not indicate how the people treated me and how great a week I had. Unfortunately, I hit too many shots.
Q. Specifically your play today, what do you think led to too many shots?
TIGER WOODS: Well, I got off to bad start and the rough grabbed me at 2. No sand in the bunker as well. Just made a mistake there. I compounded the problem there at 4. Just kept making mistakes and things you can’t do, not just in tournaments but in majors especially. And I just kept making them. I hung around for most of the day but unfortunately the damage was done early.
Q. What’s that like when you put yourself so far behind early, it’s not looking good? What do you get out of playing hard the rest of the way, outside of pride?
TIGER WOODS: Just keep fighting. Keep the pedal on, keep fighting, keep grinding, keep working hard at posting the best score that I can possibly post today. That’s all I can do. It’s going to be a lot, but I’m going to fight until the end.
Q. You said you’re getting stronger. Are you still confident the game will get better?
TIGER WOODS: It will. In time. I just got to — I need to play more. Unfortunately, I just haven’t played a whole lot of tournaments, and not a whole lot of tournaments on my schedule either. Hopefully everything will somehow come together in my practice sessions at home and be ready for
Pinehurst.
Q. Is it fair to say you’re better physically now than you were a month ago?
TIGER WOODS: Yeah.
Q. And also, what do you build on now? What do you like that you feel like you can build on to improve, say, for Pinehurst?
TIGER WOODS: Yeah, I need to clean up my rounds. But also — physically, yes, I am better than I was a month ago. I still have more ways to go, lots of improvement to go physically, and hopefully my team and I can get that done pre-Pinehurst and going into it.
Q. You talked about the desire to win again. You thought you could still win again. And yet you’re spending lot of time on the PGA TOUR policy board, which you obviously spend a lot of focus on that as well. Is there one that’s more important to you than the other?
TIGER WOODS: No, they’re both equally important to me, playing and my responsibilities as a player director, whether it’s on policy board or it’s on the enterprise board. All three are important in their own different ways. Different ways that, one, for me playing for pride and what I can do out here, but also off the golf course the impact and responsibility that I have as a player director and as a representative of the players and what I can do off the golf course to help this tour.
Q. Is the management part of that second thing, has that been a difficult transition in regards to trying to get your game together?
TIGER WOODS: Well, if you ask any of the player directors, we just don’t sleep much. There’s a lot of late nights and zoom calls at odd hours of the night, all throughout the night, and lots of e-mails to read. These are all things that I signed up for as a player director and ways that I can help, and hopefully I can make that impact and we’ve done that so far, and hopefully we can make more of an impact.
Q. Curious, as a guy who is playing the majors for 30 years and has pretty much seen everything, what did you make of this morning?
TIGER WOODS: Unfortunate. That’s all I can say. It was an unfortunate incident and I don’t know what has played out since then, but hopefully everything works out.