Tiger Woods has a real shot at winning the PGA Championship

Tiger Woods has played once since February, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be a favorite at the PGA Championship.

On Sunday, while the other top players were competing in Memphis at the WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, Tiger Woods was 1,800 miles away in San Francisco getting ready for a different tournament.

Woods got an early look over the weekend at TPC Harding Park, the venue for this week’s PGA Championship, the first (and only) major championship of the 2020 PGA Tour season. He hadn’t been there in more than a decade, but as he went along in his practice round, good memories must have started flooding in.

There are some golf courses that Woods loves: He’s won at Bay Hill, Torrey Pines and Firestone eight times (including one major), and Augusta National five times. TPC Harding Park appears to be one of them. Woods is undefeated at the course by the shore of Lake Merced, just a short drive from the campus of Stanford where he went to college. He won the WGC-American Express Championship in 2005, beating John Daly in a playoff. He then went 5-0 in the 2009 Presidents Cup, only one of his matches reaching the 17th hole.

But the course that Woods and 155 other golfers will play this week is quite different from how it played then. The fairways are narrower, the rough more thickly-grown and penal. When he won here in 2005, Woods hit just 22 of 56 fairways for the week but still shot in the 60s all four rounds. He won’t be able to do that again this week. At 7,200 yards, TPC Harding Park is short by modern major championship standards, but the heavy, cool Northern California air makes the course play much longer. Woods’ first impression of how he’ll need to play the course this week is simply to keep the ball in the short grass.

“It’s not as long, numbers-wise, but the ball never goes very far here,” he said on Tuesday at his pre-tournament press conference. “So it plays very long even though it’s short on numbers. This golf course, in particular, the big holes are big and the shorter holes are small. It can be misleading. They’ve pinched in the fairways a little bit, the rough is thick, it’s lush…(and) it’s only going to get thicker. It’s going to put a premium on putting the ball in play.”

Keeping the ball in play is something Woods has gotten better at as he’s gotten older. While he doesn’t have enough rounds to qualify this year, last season he hit nearly 66 percent of the fairways in regulation, his best mark since 2002. When he won the Zozo Championship in October, he ranked seventh in the field in driving accuracy. At the Farmers Insurance Open in January, his last top-10 finish, he was sixth in strokes gained: tee to green.

Woods has had a longer layoff than he’s used to coming into a major. He last played at the Memorial Tournament three weeks ago. He’s played just four competitive rounds on the PGA Tour since February. In the second round at the Memorial, he seemed to experience a flareup of the back injuries that have plagued him throughout his career and needed to birdie two of his last three holes to make the cut on the number. The cold Bay Area summer weather isn’t normally helpful to a player with a bad back.

But long layoffs haven’t hindered him before. His victory at the Zozo Championship came after not playing for more than two months. When he won the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in 2008, he hadn’t played in nine weeks. And he’s been staying in form at home in Florida, integrating changes into his game that were all in preparation for this final rush to the end of the season.

“More than anything, it’s just competitively I haven’t played that much. But the results that I’ve seen at home, I’m very enthusiastic about the changes I’ve made. So that’s been positive,” he said. “Keep building, keep getting ready. Be ready come Thursday.

“I feel good. Obviously, I haven’t played much competitively. But I’ve been playing a lot at home. So I’ve been getting plenty of reps that way. Just trying to get my way back into this part of the season. This is what I’ve been gearing up for.”

Woods will be paired the first two rounds with Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas, two players arriving at TPC Harding Park in completely different form. McIlroy hasn’t finished in the top-10 since the tour’s restart in June; Thomas, meanwhile, is coming off a victory on Sunday in Memphis and has been in contention three times in his last six tournaments. Brooks Koepka is trying to win his third straight PGA Championship, a feat only Walter Hagen has performed in the tournament’s history. Jon Rahm won the Memorial to get to No. 1 in the world for the first time. And Bryson DeChambeau will get his first chance to see how his new-found power plays in a major championship setting.

They’re all considered favorites, but Woods, even at 44, can’t be forgotten. He gave a clear, matter-of-fact answer when asked whether he thinks he can win this week: “Of course.”

The PGA Tour hasn’t seen much of Woods so far this summer. But he’s back and, he claims, in form to resume his chase of Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major championships. He’s owned TPC Harding Park before; 11 years later, he can do it again.