Tiger’s back! Nuts and bolts for Woods’ 2019 debut at Torrey Pines

Torrey Pines has been a house of horrors for Tiger in recent years, but Tiger made his 2019 debut without the fear and doubt that another comeback is about to come undone.

Tiger Woods posted a 2-under 70 on Thursday at the Farmers Insurance Open. A year ago, this would have been an earth-shattering accomplishment. To start 2019, it felt like an expected result. The shifting in expectations is another illustration of just all that he accomplished in the intervening comeback season.

Tiger opened this Farmers on the South Course at Torrey Pines, the tougher of the two venues. His 2-under puts him a good eight shots back of Jon Rahm, who tore it up on the easier North Course for a 62. So Woods will have work to do on that easier course Friday morning, but he’s in fine shape for a season opener.

Woods played well. The scorecard was not spectacular but he looked great. His driving, notoriously a trouble spot for him here, was steady. His ballstriking was solid. And he made some putts to put five birdies up on the board. It’s maybe not the kind of dominance that we’ve seen from him in the past, but he looked great. There are no complaints. This is who he is now — a highly competitive golfer that can be the best in the world on any given day.

After his win at the Tour Championship last September, Tiger regressed significantly at the Ryder Cup, The Match, and his Hero World Challenge. That left perhaps a lingering doubt about how he would look in his return to competition, but he quickly got back to the player we watched most of last year. That he finished 2018 as the No. 1 player in strokes gained approach is still an accomplishment that probably doesn’t get enough run. The best iron player in the history of the game got back to being just that, only now his spine was fused and he hadn’t really been a pro golfer in three years.

Some of that ballstriking was on display Thursday, especially at the 11th, a challenging par-3 where Tiger hit the best tee shot of the day.

Woods said the 2-under on the South Course was “nothing to sneeze at” but he’ll need to get more aggressive and go low on Friday. Even he admitted that he eased his way into his first round of the year, “chickening out” with some early approach shots he aimed safely into the middle of the green.

The birdies on all four par-5s is some vintage Tiger stuff. It’s the way he always dominated here and everywhere else during his peak. His closing birdie at the 18th capped the perfect day on those scoring holes.

It was a fitting end to a solid first round of 2019. It was expected and encouraging, a long ways from last year, when we were just hoping he’d break 80 and his spine would not implode on some mighty hack from the Torrey Pines rough.

Preview

The PGA Tour season is 11 events old at this point, but for most of the sports world, it doesn’t really start until this week. That’s because this week is the annual stop at Torrey Pines for the Farmers Insurance Open, and that’s where Tiger Woods joins the battle. The golf diehards may watch those fall series events and a few more may watch the Hawaii swing at the start of a new year, but Tiger’s return to the tour takes it up a level and gets the world thinking about golf, and even the Masters. It also helps that this event falls during the first weekend without football since Labor Day (the pro bowl doesn’t count as football unless you’re sick and have a problem).

Tiger returns to Torrey this year and there’s finally not a suffocating sense of dread that his spine may crumble to dust on the first swing. He makes a debut coming off a full season of PGA Tour golf for the first time since 2014, which was when his back issues really sent his career sideways. He’s also coming off a win in his last start in an official PGA Tour event. The Ryder Cup does not count as official, nor does the Hero World Challenge or “The Match.” That’s a good thing, because Tiger looked bad in all three of those events following his incredible victory at the Tour Championship.

Now he’s had almost two months off and there are no overwhelming fears about his ability to just play a full competitive round of golf or to get his “glutes activated.” That’s been a problem at this venue. We used to associate the Farmers Insurance Open with Tiger dominance. He showed up as a laughably heavy favorite and often started the year with a win. He’s won on this course eight times, including his last major, that 2008 U.S. Open title on a torn ACL. But that association changed in recent years. There was that failure of the glutes to activate. And missed cuts. And record-setting rounds for all the wrong reasons. And morose slogs that looked no fun and made you feel like his career had to be over. It became a house of horrors and really just the scene for another false start of a comeback.

Tiger may be back to being a real, competitive golfer but this is not a course that suits his strengths anymore. His distance advantage is gone. The young wave of players hit it just as far, and often farther, as they’ve grown up obsessed with speed and with the tracking data to perfectly optimize a swing for power. That power plays at Torrey and while Tiger can still swing with speed, he’s wild off the tee and that just doesn’t play with the rough they condition at this Rees Jones redesign. It’s a long course and penal for the wild drivers. So while Tiger may have owned this event during his career, it is no longer the most suitable venue for a win for him, relative to the rest of the field.

But he’s healthy. He’s coming off a win. And he’s back at Torrey without the sense that this is the start of another short-lived and hopeless comeback. Here are your nuts and bolts for his first round of 2019.

Round 1 updates

• Tiger arrived just after Noon ET. He knows he holds Golf Twitter in the palm of his hands and that every time he showed up in the parking lot last year looking, well, a little casual, people freaked out. So he rolled into 2019 in much the same fashion, just having a little fun with all of us.

• Tiger’s first tee ball of the year was an absolute bomb right down the heart of the first fairway at Torrey’s South Course. That hole has given him trouble throughout his career. It’s been among his worst, relative to par, and he had just watched Xander Schauffele bomb one wide left, which is Tiger’s traditional miss there. His first driver of the year, however, was perfect and not something we saw in spades during last year’s comeback season.
• At the third hole, Tiger showed a bit of action that landed him No. 1 on the PGA Tour in strokes gained approach by the end of last season. He’s the best iron player of all time and this is some of the ballstriking that has him back to being among the most competitive players in the world.

• Tiger is stuck in neutral on the front nine of the South Course, failing to make a birdie through his first five holes and dropping a shot at the second. He’s not looked bad, just missed a couple birdie chances and a par-save from 15 feet at the second. His early 1-over mark has him T103rd but that means almost nothing at this point.
• Jon Rahm is the early pacesetter, going out in 29 and racing to 7-under early in the first round. The 2017 winner here has been unconscious on his opening nine at the North Course.

Thursday’s tee times

Tiger will play with the current FedExCup No. 1, Xander Schauffele, and his 2018 Ryder Cup teammate, Tony Finau. Tiger indicated this week that he has never played with either one during a PGA Tour round, so this will be a new but probably not uncomfortable experience. He got to know Finau at the Ryder Cup and probably crossed paths with the X-man, a San Diego native, during last season.

For an event that’s loaded, these aren’t exactly the household names you might expect in a Tiger power-grouping. But it’s good to see the Tour throwing some fresh faces into the spotlight. They’ve earned it. Tiger’s group will go off No. 1 on the South Course at 1:40 ET.

Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images

Like many events in this first quarter of the year with limited daylight, the Farmers takes place on multiple courses before the cut is made. That is the case with three of the five events on the West Coast swing. Each player at the Farmers plays one round on the North Course and one round on the South Course before everything moves to the South for the weekend with the field cut in half. This is arguably the best municipal golf complex in the country given the setting and pedigree, but architecture experts will tell you it could be so much better than the Rees Jones redesign that feels like a waste of the seaside terrain.

Tiger starts on the South Course, traditionally the harder of the two, before jumping to the North for Friday’s second round. There will be morning and afternoon waves off the 1st and 10th tees at both courses to ensure this full field gets through 36 holes by the weekend. The primary weather delays at this event are usually caused by early morning fog but things generally stay on schedule in San Diego. The two courses mean that most of the field is in action at the same time, as opposed to the often sun-up to sun-down golf we endure with a full field. Here are some notable tee times for the opening round. The tee sheet has plenty of starpower (all times ET):

• 12:30 p.m. — Charles Howell III, Cameron Champ, Michael Kim
• 12:30 p.m. — Brandt Snedeker, Jason Day, Jon Rahm
• 12:40 p.m. — Justin Rose, Billy Horschel, Jordan Spieth
• 1:30 p.m. — Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Adam Scott
• 1:40 p.m. — Xander Schauffele, Tiger Woods, Tony Finau
• 1:40 p.m. — Patrick Reed, Kyle Stanley, Mackenzie Hughes

You can view a full tee sheet here.

Thursday’s first-round coverage

Golf Channel will have the coverage all day on Thursday before CBS takes over on the weekend. Golf Channel is now the PGA Tour’s partner for PGA Tour Live, which was carried in several places during its first few years of existence. Now the Tour’s OTT production has settled down with NBC Sports Gold, the sister network of Golf Channel. So that’s where you can find featured groups coverage during Thursday and Friday rounds this year. You will need a subscription but not on this Thursday, because Golf Channel is just going to run a “sneak peek” of the OTT streaming service on its linear TV channel beginning at Noon.

So you will not need a subscription to watch Tiger from the very first tee in his first round. Turn on Golf Channel or pull up the simulcast stream for it below.

Television:

Noon to 3 p.m. ET — PGA Tour Live free preview on Golf Channel with start of Tiger’s round

3 to 7 p.m. ET — Golf Channel’s regular broadcast coverage

Online streams:

Noon to 7 p.m. ET— Golf Channel simulcast stream

11:45 a.m. ET— PGA Tour Live on NBC Sports Gold starts with coverage from range and opening holes

• 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET — Free PGA Tour live stream on Twitter

Featured Groups (NBC Sports Gold)

• 12:30 p.m. ET — Brandt Snedeker / Jason Day / Jon Rahm
• 12:40 p.m. ET — Justin Rose / Jordan Spieth / Billy Horschel
• 1:40 p.m. ET — Bonus coverage of Tiger Woods’ round

Radio:

1 to 7 p.m. ET — PGA Tour Radio on Sirius-XM (Ch. 92/208 and streamed here)