Sports
Is Tiger Woods Ready To Reign Again?
Back at world number one for the first time since October 2010 and hot favourite to win his fifth Green Jacket at the Masters this week. The 37-year-old has certainly been in impressive form, winning three times in four strokeplay events this year, and six times in his last 20 starts on the PGA Tour.
So is this the start of a new period of dominance for a player who was the game’s eminent force for more than a decade? And can the Masters kick-start the American’s quest to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors? After all, he has been stuck on 14 major titles since 2008, derailed by scandal, injury and struggles with a new swing.
How has his game changed since those halcyon days of a decade ago, and can he become even better than he was back then?
Woods has been working with Canadian Sean Foley since 2010 following the departure of long-term coach Hank Haney, with whom he won six majors.
At times Woods has struggled with Foley’s concept, most notably at the Masters last year, when he appeared to fight the swing and struggled home in a tie for 40th, his worst finish as a pro at Augusta. Now he appears comfortable with what he is doing and the results show it.
“Foley has got his arms working a lot more up and down whereas Haney had the swing working around him more, like Ben Hogan,” says Tour coach Jonathan Yarwood.
“The techniques are quite juxtaposed. Foley is trying to use the body through impact to reduce hand action and achieve more consistency. It’s working well with his irons but with the driver it is still a work in progress.”
Driving, accuracy, rather than length, has always been Woods’ nemesis. It’s easy to get bogged down in statistics, but since he won his first major in 1997, he has only featured in the top 100 in driving accuracy stats five times (1997, 1999, 2000, 2009, 2012). Even then, 53rd last year was his highest position. After his latest Bay Hill win he was ranked 142nd.
With his irons he has made substantial progress since 2010, according to the statistics for greens in regulation (hitting every green to allow two putts for par). But he is yet to reach the heights of the Haney or Butch Harmon (Woods’s coach from 1993-2004) eras, when he regularly topped the rankings in this category.
“The golf swing is like a painting that never gets finished,” said Yarwood. “They are always refining, tweaking, adding little brush strokes. Woods is the Picasso of golf, and a little brushstroke here and there can make an enormous difference.
“Tiger’s got a little too technical at times but he’s started to come out of that and is starting to flow.”
Woods agrees. “I’m very pleased that some of the shots that I struggled with last year are now strengths,” he said. “My good ones are really good. It’s just making sure the bad ones aren’t that bad. I can still continue to improve and clean up my short game. I don’t want to become as good as I once was. I want to become better.”
“This year his creativity with shot-making has returned in a way that I haven’t seen since 2009,” said international golf journalist and seasoned Woods watcher, Robert Lusetich.
“But he’s better than he was then because under Haney, Tiger feared the big miss to the left, so he became more and more defensive with the driver, sort of bunting shots out to the right. He hits it now much straighter and much longer.
“What he had with Haney was distance control and that’s now where he’s getting to with Foley. Once he has distances dialled in, he’s hard to beat, especially because his putting is off-the-charts.”
In his glory days, Woods was one of the hottest putters ever to play the game. Time and again he would drain key putts, not only for birdies but to save crucial pars. The sight of a Woods fist-pump as another bomb disappeared from view became legendary. In the last few years, the focus on his long game has impacted on his putting and short game. But a 45-minute putting lesson from his Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup team-mate Steve Stricker at Doral seems to have been the turning point.
Stricker played down the significance of their session but admitted Woods left in high spirits and went on to win the tournament, following it up with victory at Bay Hill on his next outing. Woods now tops the overall putting statistics, compared to 28th at the end of last year.
“There were just some set-up issues,” said Stricker. “He got into some poor positions. I’ve watched him over the years I know his stroke and just tried to get him back into the positions that he is usually in.”
Lusetich said: “The thing that separated Tiger for many years, and allowed him to win tournaments with his “B” game was the fact he canned so many 20 footers. If he leads the field in putting, it’s game over.”
Injuries have played a key role in the Tiger Woods story and shaped the way he swings the club and how much he has been able to practise. He won his last major while suffering from a double stress fracture of the left leg and knee ligament damage, and immediately took eight months off for reconstructive surgery, his fourth operation on the same knee.
Woods also missed the 2011 US Open and Open because of further left knee and Achilles tendon problems suffered when he hit a shot out of the pine straw at Augusta that April. He was still being plagued by the Achilles in early 2012.
“If I get healthy, I know I can play this game at a high level,” said Woods after his win at Bay Hill.
“I know I can be where I’m contending in every event, contending in major championships and being consistent day in and day out. That was the first step in the process. Once I got there, then my game turned.”
Veteran US golfer writer Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press said: “If you look back, his health was big part of it. He couldn’t work as much as he used to. When he finished his second round at Bay Hill he went straight to the range and stayed there for an hour and a half. That’s the sort of thing he couldn’t do from late 2010 onwards.”
Now, though, he is playing injury free and that has played a key part in his rise back to the top of the rankings.
Much has happened to Woods since that fateful night when he crashed his car and the details spilled forth about his extra-curricular activities. But the talk from the Tour is that he is now a much happier individual. Clearly winning helps, but after divorce in the summer of 2010, Woods has a new love interest in US ski star Lindsey Vonn.
When quizzed about the link between a new squeeze and an upsurge in form, Woods grinned and said: “You’re reading way too much into this.” The old Tiger would have stonewalled.
“He just seems in a better place, mentally, to me,” said Stricker. “I don’t really know too much about his personal life, but it just seems like he’s happier, a little more at peace or at ease with himself. He seems to be having fun, to have a lot of confidence in himself and his game.
“I think he learned a lot from a couple of years ago – be more cordial to everybody, respect other people. He is happier with himself, you can see it. Just the way he is treating people is better. It looks like he is working hard at it.”
“There is no question in my mind Tiger took a very big hit to his confidence,” said Lusetich, author of “Unplayable”, an account of Woods’s tumultuous 2009 season which ended in scandal.
“I’m not sure he believed in himself after being exposed and I think he was deeply embarrassed. Other athletes have been through similar things – probably not of the same magnitude – and they’ve rebounded because they’ve answered on the field of play. It’s been a very awkward time for him but he seems to have healed those wounds.
“That’s obviously a huge part of the answer as to why Tiger’s back. The turmoil has been replaced and there is stability. He’s had a couple of years to get used to being a divorced parent of two young children. He and his ex-wife have figured out how to make that work and he obviously has this new relationship.
Hodgetts writes for BBC Sports
Bob Hodgetts
Senegal goalkeeper Edouard Mendy has said that criticism that he and other players chased money by moving to Saudi Arabia is wide of the mark.
The 33-year-old left Chelsea for Al-Ahli in a £16m ($21.4m) deal in 2023, and in May the Africa Cup of Nations winner helped his Saudi club win the Asian Champions League, making him one of the few players to win both that competition and its European equivalent.
But, like many others, Mendy has been criticised for playing for money rather than prestige in the lucrative Saudi Pro League.
When asked about such criticism, Mendy told a Tidesports source, “Al-Ahli’s project came along and they made me feel I had a big role to play.
“Two years later, we won the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history. So yes, that validates my choice. And I hope the coming years will validate it even more.”
He added: “Some people will quickly jump to conclusions and say the only reason is money. From the start, I always said that when I left Chelsea, I knew I was joining another team where I could win everything , which was no longer the case at Chelsea.”
The Blues have since won the Conference League, Europe’s third-tier club competition, under the ownership of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.
But it comes after the regime’s trophyless first two years, a period which has frustrated some supporters after the success enjoyed under Roman Abramovich’s stewardship in the previous 19 years.
Mendy has also been celebrating what he describes as a historical win with Senegal against England at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground, but days earlier he had been in Dakar delivering a different kind of win.
He is the sponsor of Yakaar, a school in Keur Massar, which seeks to improve funding and access to digital learning tools for local children from underprivileged backgrounds.
Famously, as Mendy grew up in France, he was unemployed, aged 22, while struggling to find a club, with members of his family still living on the outskirts of Dakar.
That is why Yakaar, a word meaning “hope”, was chosen, a word Mendy has carried with him in his career.
“Hope is what kept me going. When I was without a club, it was the hope of getting that first professional contract.
“Then the hope of playing for the national team. The hope of making my family proud by doing the job I had always dreamed of.
“Indeed, hope is the best word to describe my career.”
Mendy was also asked whether the responsibility of being an African goalkeeper had weighed heavily on him.
“Of course. When I was in England, there weren’t many African goalkeepers in top clubs,” he admitted.
“Whether nationally or internationally, I had that responsibility. It’s the same for other African goalkeepers like Andre Onana [Manchester United] or Yassine Bounou (Al-Hilal).”
The entire refereeing committee has been fired by the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), with structural reforms soon set to follow.
According to sources, the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) has dismissed the entire refereeing committee in response to mounting pressure from clubs demanding structural reform. A major shake-up aimed at modernising Spanish refereeing from top to bottom has now been set in motion.
Head of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA), Luis Medina Cantalejo and Head of VAR, Carlos Clos Gomez, have been removed from their positions. They are joined by several senior officials, including Antonio Rubinos Perez and three vice presidents, who are also stepping down. A new leadership model will be introduced, led by a CEO and a sporting director, aiming to overhaul how refereeing is managed covering assessments, promotions, and daily operations. While the leadership changes are sweeping, the current pool of referees in La Liga and the second tier will remain, ensuring continuity on the field during the transition.
Cristiano Ronaldo has signed a new two-year contract with Al-Nassr that means he will stay with the Saudi Pro League club until beyond his 42nd birthday.
The Portugal captain, 40, joined the Riyadh-based team in December 2022 after leaving Manchester United in acrimonious circumstances, having criticised the club and said he had no respect for manager Erik ten Hag.
Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr deal had been due to expire at the end of June and there was speculation he could leave, but that has now been quashed.
In a post on X, Ronaldo wrote: “A new chapter begins. Same passion, same dream. Let’s make history together.”
Although Al-Nassr have not added to their nine domestic titles during Ronaldo’s time at the club, they have benefited from a flood of goals from the five-time Ballon d’Or winner.
Ronaldo scored 35 times in 41 matches across all competitions last term and was the league’s top scorer for a second consecutive season.
He has managed 99 goals in appearances overall for Al-Nassr and is well on his way to reaching 1,000 senior goals in his career, with a current tally of 938 for club and country.
Having helped Portugal win the Uefa Nations League a little over two weeks ago, the former Manchester United, Real Madrid, Sporting and Juventus forward will almost certainly now be targeting a sixth World Cup appearance next summer.
Only a month ago, Ronaldo posted on social media to say “the chapter is over”.
That came after the Saudi Pro League wrapped up with Al-Nassr finishing third and trophyless once again.
The comment fuelled rumours that Ronaldo was ready to leave the league where he reportedly became the best-paid player in football history with an annual salary of £177m when he joined.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino raised the prospect of Ronaldo joining a team involved in the Club World Cup after Al-Nassr failed to qualify for the extended tournament which is being held in the United States.
Ronaldo said he had received offers from participating teams but had turned them down.
The decision to stay until at least 2027, which is certain to be highly lucrative, appears to rule out any future prospect of Ronaldo returning to play at the highest level in Europe.