Tiger Woods could not have asked for much more at his first Wyndham Championship.
He is playing with confidence. His scores show it. And now he is to play a final round that matters.
Woods shot a two-under 68 in the third round on Saturday, leaving him two strokes behind leader and longtime friend Jason Gore in a three-way tie for second.
Photo: AFP
Gore had a career-best 62 to reach 15-under 195 at Sedgefield Country Club.
“I need to go out there tomorrow and make a run and get myself up there and make some birdies,” Woods said. “There’s a bunch of guys ... at 13. There’s a whole slew of guys at 12, 11, 10. Anybody can make a run and shoot the score Jason and Jonas [Blixt] did.”
Woods — whose streak of 28 holes without a bogey ended on the 18th when his 6-foot par putt lipped out — reeled off 10 straight pars before briefly moving within one stroke of Gore with a birdie on the par-three 16th.
“I felt very steady from the word ‘go,’” Woods said.
Blixt and Scott Brown joined Woods at 13-under. Blixt shot a career-best 62, and Brown had a 66.
Former Wyndham winners Webb Simpson (64) and Brandt Snedeker (67) were three strokes back, along with Paul Casey (66), Jim Herman (66) and Cameron Percy (67).
Woods was poised to make a run at his first win in more than two years — one that would earn him enough points to clinch a spot in the FedEx Cup playoffs opener next week in New Jersey. Depending on the math, a solo second-place finish also might be enough for Woods, who is ranked No. 187.
“I think it’s awesome to see him playing well again, to see him playing like Tiger Woods, because that’s what we all want to see,” Gore said.
Woods also moved one step closer to his 80th PGA Tour victory — and first since the 2013 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational.
Playing the Wyndham for the first time in an effort to hone his game and earn a spot in The Barclays, Woods is attempting to win a tournament in his first try for the first time since 1999 — when he won the WGC-Cadillac Championship in Spain.
For him, this day was about consistently making pars — 15 in all, including a remarkable save on the 10th with a 24-foot putt.
“The putter just felt really good. My pace, I felt like I could be aggressive,” Woods said. “I took a few runs at putts and ripped them past the hole, but I never felt like I was going to miss any of them. I took a rip at them. Some I made, some I didn’t.”
His only birdie on the back nine was an important one. He plopped his tee shot on 16 about 12 feet from the hole and rolled in the putt to move to 14-under before giving that stroke back on his final hole.
That bogey prevented a final pairing with Gore, who was instead paired with Blixt.
Gore said he has known Woods “since we’ve been 12 years old” as children in California.
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