Woods favourite to win second major

It's hard to remember what came first, the gaudy expectations or the marketing blitz.

Tiger Woods was going to be the player to top Jack Nicklaus's 18 major championships. He'd win 10 green jackets at Augusta. The rest of the field would have to settle for second whenever he was around.

It's now year four of the Tiger, and 10 majors have come and gone without his name on a trophy. When the 81st PGA Championship begins Thursday at Medinah Country Club, though, Woods will be a favourite again.

"Right now, I'm honestly playing pretty good," he said today. "I've played pretty good since the Byron Nelson. My worst finish has been seventh, and I'm very positive and feel like my game is rounding into shape."

Woods may not have won a major since steamrolling through The Masters in 1997, but his game has never been better. Since tying for seventh in the GTE Byron Nelson Classic in May, he's won three tournaments, including a European Tour event.

His victory in the Western Open last month was his third in four tournaments. He leads the PGA Tour in top-three finishes this year with six. He dropped to No. 2 in the Official World Golf Ranking this week only because of a quirk in the way the rankings are figured.

Even last year, when he struggled to adjust to changes he made in his swing, he held the No. 1 ranking and led the tour with 13 top-10 finishes despite winning "only" one PGA Tour event.

Still, the question of when he's going to win another major and start chasing Nicklaus again dogs him. Of the 17 players with five majors, all but one (Lee Trevino) won his second in seven attempts or less after winning their first.

"All I can do is keep giving myself chances and I've come close a couple of times this year," said Woods, who had an outside shot at The Masters entering the final round, tied for third in the U.S. Open and tied for seventh in the Open. "You can't win every time you're in the hunt. You'd like to, but it just doesn't happen that way.

"I look at Jack's career and Jack finished second in 19 majors. How did he feel about losing that many times?" he added. "The key is to keep giving yourself chances and eventually you're going to win a few."

There's another thing to remember about Nicklaus, Greg Norman said. The intensity of the game has increased tremendously in the last 10 years, let alone the last 30. While Nicklaus was popular, he didn't have the hordes of people following him wherever he went.

When Woods won the 1997 Western Open, thousands of people broke through the security ropes and followed him up the 18th fairway. When he left the interview room today after a 30-minute question-and-answer session, he spent another 20 minutes answering questions outside.

"It's easy for us to sit here and say, 'Yeah, it's just another golf tournament.' You can wrap yourself in a cocoon and say, 'I'm not going to read the paper.' But it builds up," Norman said. "Any young individual coming out nowadays has to be an extremely, extremely talented individual and have the ability to deal with it."

The depth of talent Woods faces is tougher than what Nicklaus saw, too. Every week, he's playing against guys like David Duval, Payne Stewart and Phil Mickelson. And if that's not bad enough, some no-name always seems to break out and win one of the majors.

Look at this year's Open. Winner Paul Lawrie was ranked 159th and had to qualify to get into the tournament. The guy who had the tournament won until a disastrous 18th hole, Jean Van de Velde, was 23rd on the European Tour last year.

"Is it a possibility? Well, yeah," Woods said of breaking Nicklaus's record. "How realistic is it? I don't know."

And he isn't so sure if already having five or six majors on his resume would be good for him. The pressures of 1997 were so intense that only one other person in the world, his "big brother" Michael Jordan, could identify.

But while his struggles with his game weren't easy, and it hasn't always been fun to be Tiger Woods, it has all made him a better person.

"I'm only 23," he said. "I'm glad I went through those things because it helped me to get to the point where I am at now as quickly as I've gotten there. If I had had success in major championships, I probably wouldn't have learned as much. Not only on the golf course, but on life in general."

AP