During his Injury, Woods Has New Challengers on the Tee

January 8, 2009

Other players besides Tiger Woods are heating up on the tee.

KAPALUA, Hawaii — For the last decade, professional golf’s opening day has come here on the island of Maui, a mountainous tropical setting in the Pacific far from the cold-fingered, overlapping grip of winter. The comfortable constancy remains in place this year as 33 PGA Tour winners from 2008 tee off Thursday in the 2009 Mercedes Championship on the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort above Honolua Bay.

But bubbling like lava beneath the familiar feel and collegial vibe of the $5.6 million event is an undercurrent of change, a surge of youthful energy that has raised much anticipation for the new year. Among the 12 newcomers who have crashed the exclusive winners-only party at Kapalua are two golfers with star power — Anthony Kim and Colombia’s Camilo Villegas — who have enough game and mettle to be mentioned as potential challengers to the world’s No. 1 golfer, Tiger Woods.

With Woods out of action until at least March rehabbing his knee, Kim, 23, and Villegas, 27, will have the chance to further validate the two ’08 Tour victories each of them had during Woods’s absence.

Further fueling speculation is that neither is shrinking from the opportunity. Each holds Woods and his achievements in high regard; neither is intimidated by his greatness.

“I think there’s a lot of things I can learn from him,” said Kim, who already has modeled his pretournament routine after Woods’s. “And who knows, I’m not going to put any limits on myself. I don’t want to say that I can’t be great one day, but I still have to put in the work.”

The lean and powerful Villegas has the confident mien of a fighter who knows he is fast and is not afraid to prove it. When he finally began holing some putts at the end of last season, he won twice in succession during the Playoffs for FedEx Cup, taking the BMW Championship and Tour Championship to break through in his fourth year on the tour.

“It’s just maybe changes that are this big,” Villegas said, pinching thumb and index finger together. “And then you are feeling a little bit more confidence. It’s a little bit of everything. You make more putts and you feel more confident, and all of a sudden you put less pressure on your ball-striking and you start hitting the ball a little bit better.

“So you go, a little, a little, a little and then you get a couple wins.”

Villegas and Kim are not kidding themselves into believing that Woods will be anything but his old self when he returns, probably in March. Woods said two weeks ago that he was ahead of schedule on his rehab, that he was hitting full shots and expecting the knee to be better than it has been in years.

But a couple of wins is a couple of wins, and though Kim has never finished higher than Woods at a tournament, he has at least won Woods’s tournament, the AT&T National. And he performed well at an off-season clinic, during which he hit shots for Woods while Woods described the ball flight. His only embarrassing moment came when he guessed that Woods’s major championship total was eight instead of 14.

“I’m not a huge golf fan,” Kim said, laughing, “so I don’t know all the stats. I really thought he had won about eight majors and he told me he won 14. I didn’t know that.

“Obviously, he’s the best player in the world and nobody is taking that away from him right now. I’m going to do my best to keep grinding and working toward that goal.”

Veterans on the tour have noticed just how hard Kim, Villegas and other young players such as Sergio Garcia, Andres Romero, Adam Scott and Hunter Mahan are working. Ernie Els, who is back at the Mercedes Championship after a three-year absence, was once a young gun on the tour. He won the United States Open in 1994 at age 24.

Now 39 and in the process of regaining his form after a series of injuries, Els looks at the young players and sees a trend.

“I was that age, and you come through and you want to run through walls,” he said. “You don’t care how you’re going to win, and that’s what’s happening now. It’s just a change of the guard, basically.”

If it is, it is only the beginning. When García, 28, took over as No. 2 in the world in November, he got as close to Woods as he has ever been. Neither is here this week to change that, nor is No. 3 Phil Mickelson or No. 4 Padraig Harrington. When he returns, Woods is likely to be in his customary and comfortable position atop the world rankings, where he has reigned for the last 185 weeks.

According to Golf World, of the nine players who have risen to the No. 2 position since Woods first assumed the top spot in June of 1997, Vijay Singh is the only one to have ousted Woods for longer than 15 weeks. Singh ended Woods’s 264-week hold on No. 1 in September of 2004 and remained No. 1 for 32 weeks

Since regaining the top spot in June 2005, Woods has stiff-armed the world. But the severity of his knee injury and the seven months he will have been away has put the faint smell of blood in the water for the first time in a long time. Though the young guns have not yet circled Tiger Woods, they have at least picked up the scent.

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