(Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images)
Golf writer Andy Reistetter is on site at The TOUR Championship Presented by Coca-Cola at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia and is providing daily reports covering the action both inside and outside the ropes.
O.K., so it is not Sunday afternoon at a World Golf Championship event.
It's not Woods versus Rocco Mediate during a Monday playoff for the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.
But is sure felt like it today at East Lake, with the marquee Woods and Harrington twosome in the next-to-last pairing at The Tour Championship/FedExCup Playoff Finale.
Call it what you like, but it was dramatic. It was intense. It was playoff golf at its best, and I can't wait until Sunday afternoon.
You know you are a golf nut when you used to enjoy when the football season came. All the golf pretenders left the golf courses to you and your pals when they went inside and started watching college football on Saturday and the NFL on Sunday. Talk about three-and-a-half hour rounds in all their glory!
But then Commissioner Finchem and the PGA TOUR had to invent the golf playoffs to stretch the season, interest, and revenues into September. Now, we are as hopeless as those football guys and missing out on our autumnal exercise on the links.
It was classic Woods early on, with razor-sharp irons and makeable birdie putts slipping by on the edge of the hole. Then the frustrated three-putt bogey on No. 5 that really got "da man"—as they call him here in Atlanta—pissed off.
You knew a streak was coming and sure enough, it happened, when Woods birdied three in a row to close out the front nine.
The birdie on No. 7 coupled with a Harrington bogey erased the Irishman's two-stroke lead. Ditto the same two-stroke swing with a Stewart Cink birdie and a Sean O'Hair bogey moments later in the final pairing of the day on the same seventh hole.
It was O'Hair, Cink, Woods, and Harrington dodging up and down the leaderboard on the front nine.
Whose tournament would it be on this no-cut Friday? An exclusive 30-member field earned their chances for the $10 million FedExCup prize with outstanding performance over the prior 36 weeks of competition.
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