With WGC Victory, Tiger Woods Must Be Favorite for PGA

Several times in the past two years Tiger Woods has looked like Tiger Woods, but at the WGC Bridgestone, he finally played like Tiger Woods. It's a good sign for the PGA.

"Any time you can go into a major tournament or any tournament with a win under your belt it's nice. It validates what you're working on and you have some nice momentum going in there," Woods said before he won on Sunday in Akron, Ohio.

Woods played like vintage Tiger. He got a big lead, and he kept it. He made everybody else play catch-up. In majors that Woods has won in the past, he got a lead by day's end on Friday, certainly by Saturday, sometimes by a sizable margin, and kept it until the end of the day Sunday. That's exactly what he did at Firestone.

"With it being as blustery as it was, it was going to be really hard for someone to shoot 62 or 63," Woods said after winning. "If I didn't give any shots away today and played my game and shot even par or better, I'd have to force these guys to go and shoot something super low on a golf course that wasn't going to give it up under these conditions."  

He said he was playing for pars on Sunday. The last time Woods was able to build a lead like this was in 2009 at the BMW where he also had a seven-shot margin. When you win by that much, what's left to practice before the PGA? Not much, according to Woods. He'll rest a lot on Monday and Tuesday because he has seen how tough the course is.

"The rough was already up when I played it on Tuesday, he said. "It has another week of getting thicker and more lush. And I don't know what they're going to top that out at by game time come Thursday, but I think that it'll be a very, very difficult championship."

Like many tournaments Woods has won in the past, he didn't hit a lot of fairways at Firestone, just 57 percent on Saturday and Sunday. His best fairway percentage was actually Thursday when he fired a 66.

Although ability to find the short grass off the tee has been fairly abysmal, that could be a good sign because, even though he was in the rough a lot, except for the third round, he had decent greens in regulation numbers. It was 83 percent on Sunday. The man just knows how to post a score.

Like many vintage Tiger victories, we saw a couple of miracle shots, the chip-in at the 13th on Saturday being most memorable. Let's face it. No real Tiger Woods victory is complete without a miracle shot or two.

Finally, Woods was a putting genius on Friday. So he and his putter have kissed and made up. The only concern there is that on Friday, when he tied his own course record of 61, he had a putt to go to minus-10 at the 17th, which could have set up 59, and he couldn't convert it.

Nerves? Pressure? We'll never know. But by Sunday morning, he was so far ahead, he could have putted with a 3-wood and still won.

"This week I felt like I had the same type of control this week as I did at the British Open," Woods explained. "Only difference is I had one hot putting day, and the rest of the days—I putted well on Thursday, but the last two days I didn't really need to."

As Woods looks forward to the season's final major, he knows his game is on good shape. Oak Hill will be so difficult that if he can just play the way he did on the weekend at Firestone, he has a great chance to win.

"Oak Hill is going to be a golf course where we're going to have to make a lot of pars, there's no doubt.  If you have an opportunity to make a birdie, you'd better because there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to make them," Woods said. 

"There are a few holes that you can be aggressive on and maybe a few pin locations that if you have the right situation you can be pretty aggressive to it, but otherwise it's going to be a tough golf course."

Could this be the week for major No. 15? He looked very good on Sunday. If he plays the way he did at Firestone, Woods has a trophy room ready and waiting.

"The majors are in a certain section of the house, and the other trophies are downstairs where I have basically a media room and stuff like that," he explained. "But the majors are in a different spot."

Kathy Bissell is a Golf Writer for Bleacher Report. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained first-hand or from official interview materials from the USGA, PGA Tour or PGA of America.