Woods surprises Oakmont gallery
Tiger Woods came to Oakmont Country Club, saw 54 holes of it, and now, all that's left to be determined is whether he'll conquer it when the U.S. Open is played there later this year.
Woods finished off his weekend in Pittsburgh by playing a briskly paced practice round with a gallery of some 50 American Express cardholders who had paid $900 to play Oakmont on Monday morning.
But they had no idea they were going to get the chance to watch Woods.
Jud Linville, president of the Consumer Card Services Group at American Express, announced Woods, which elicited a strange reaction.
The crowd looked in the doorway to see if he was really there. And once determining that he was, the crowd rose quickly to its feet, applauding, cheering and whistling as Woods strode to the podium with a big smile.
"I hope you guys didn't get too slaughtered out there today," he said, laughing.
Before Woods made his appearance, he shared some of his thoughts about Oakmont in a few one-on-one interviews.
"It's one of the great, old golf courses; that's pretty obvious," Woods said. "But it's probably going to take a few more times around it to get the correct lines off the tees and because of the number of blind shots that are out there."
Woods said, prior to this weekend, the only exposure he's had to Oakmont was a videotape of the 1994 U.S. Open.
"That's the only vision I had of the place. And when you go around it, you see that television softens a lot of the course. Things are a lot more severe around here," Woods said. "Everybody keeps telling me the fairways are fast here, but yesterday, I was hitting drivers that kept jumping back."
From the moment Woods stepped onto the first tee and pulled the Sasquatch Sumo Squared driver from his bag and launched his Nike One ball approximately 330 yards to the middle of the fairway, he made sure the gallery knew what was going on every step of the way.
He interacted with the gallery, provided tips and even had Dr. Victor Novak, a Somerset surgeon, caddie for him on the eighth hole.
After Woods ripped another 3-wood pin high on the 288-yard hole -- "A nice, drivable par-4," he said -- Novak carried the bag to the green.
He then helped Woods read the putt and was handed the putter and told to "finish it" after Woods missed the first putt. Novak drilled the uphill putt into the back of the cup to the applause of the gallery.
"This is the kind of thing that so rarely happens," Novak said. "He's been tremendous with us all afternoon, and while everybody would like to execute like he does, we know we can't. "But it's interesting to see how he sets things up on every shot."
