Tiger Woods admitted he will celebrate his WGC-Bridgestone Invitational win “quickly” before turning his attention to the US PGA, which begins on Thursday.
Following his disastrous Open championship at Turnberry, where he missed the cut, Woods has won two tournaments in a row, and is eyeing a third at the Hazeltine National in Chaska, Minnesota this weekend.
“It’s going to be a quick turnaround,” Woods said. “I’ll be out there tomorrow. I’ll celebrate quickly.
“I’m going to play Monday and Tuesday and then do nothing on Wednesday, just practice, that’s it. Get to know the golf course a little bit on Monday and Tuesday and then shut it down Wednesday.”
Woods won the Buick Open in Michigan on Aug 2 and followed it up with a four-stroke win over Padraig Harrington and Robert Allenby at Firestone Country Club yesterday.
And he insisted the two wins came as a relief following his performance at Turnberry, although he argues it was not as bad a performance as some were led to believe.
“I just felt that I had six bad holes, and that six bad holes took me out of the championship, and I only missed the cut by a shot,” he said.
“it wasn’t, I don’t think, as bad as everyone thought it would have been. You’ve just got to not have those bad stretches, just clean it up a little bit.
“I was able to do it the last couple weeks, and instead of having a bad stretch, I had positive ones,” he added.
Padraig Harrington will scale back the preparations for his US PGA Championship defence this week following his last-round defeat by Tiger Woods in the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational in Ohio.
Harrington put eight months of struggle with swing changes behind him at Firestone Country Club to lead for three rounds and battle down the stretch with the world No 1 for 16 holes before sending his hopes of a first title this year into a greenside pond.
He admitted that the encounter with Woods, played out in 90-degree plus heat and high humidity, had taken a physical toll ahead of his journey to Hazeltine National in Chaska for the final major of the year.
“There’s no doubt that it’s not the greatest preparation in the world to have an adrenalin-filled week of holding the lead all week and doing all the interviews and all that,” Harrington said. “I’ll probably just take it a little bit easier for the three practice days.
“Instead of getting out there, I certainly won’t be playing 54 holes over the next three days. I’ll probably just take it easy and rest up, working on the principle that if I’m to win next week I’ve got to be fresh on Sunday.”
A further obstacle to that hope, he revealed, would be the fact he and 2002 champion Rich Beem had been paired by the PGA of America to play with Woods for the first two rounds, thus having to deal with the hoopla over 36 holes that accompanies the world’s best player wherever he plays.
“The hardest thing about playing with Tiger in the first few days is very few players play very well in the next two days after,” Harrington said. “It wears guys down playing with Tiger the first two rounds of a major. On the Saturday and Sunday, after the hype has gone away, they’ve struggled.
“Because of the hype and adrenalin you use up playing with Tiger on the Thursday and Friday, there’s a little bit of a lull afterwards, and players have tended not to perform as well.”
That was not a problem for Harrington the last time he was paired with Woods in the first two days of a tournament, at this year’s US Open at Bethpage Black. “I missed the cut,” he said with a laugh.
Nevertheless, Harrington said he had taken the warning on board and would be prepared come Thursday. “The tournament doesn’t start in a major until the weekend or the last round. So the last thing you want to do is get too hyped up early on, and it’s possible with all the tension that you would.”
Harrington said he would take a lot of positives from his tie for second behind Woods at Firestone. “I was happy with the week overall, yes. Obviously a disappointing finish to the week. I certainly did a lot of things that you need to do right when you want to play good tournaments, and I did a lot of that this week.
“My short game was sharp. I probably see a bit of a weakness in my wedge play . . . that needs a bit of improvement. And the long game was sufficient anyway.”
Tiger Woods has become the first billion-dollar sportsman after 13 years as a professional golfer.
According to Forbes, the $10 million [£6.2 million] bonus that Woods got for his recent FedEx Cup win pushed him over the $1 billion [£620 million] mark in total career earnings.
Up to the beginning of 2009, the world’s number one golfer had earned $895 million from prize money, appearance fees, sponsorship and from designing golf courses.
Adding together his winnings from this year together with his annual $100 million earnings, this makes Woods the first dollar billionaire sportsman.
Woods, 34, has been the world’s highest paid sportsman since 2002, when he overtook Formula One’s Michael Schumacher.
In the past seven years his earnings have rocketed as he diversified into golf course design.
The bulk of Woods’s earnings come from his long-term partnership with sports giant Nike, which paya him upwards of £20 million a year.
The Forbes report also found America’s wealthiest are getting poorer as a direct of result of the financial crisis, with the country’s ten richest individuals seeing $39.2bn (£24.5bn) wiped off their collective wealth in just a year.
The net worth of the 400 most affluent people in the US fell by $300bn in the past 12 months, from $1.57 trillion to $1.27 trillion.
The findings come from the latest survey of America’s 400 richest people by Forbes magazine – the Forbes 400.
September 2009
September 10th, 2009 
