Singh tries to shrug off losses
Updated: March 25, 2005, 5:29 PM ET
By Tim Rosaforte | Golf World
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – The man has picked himself up and dusted himself off and is right back where we expected him to be after the opening round of The Players Championship. In contention once again, hunting down another victory, playing golf with supreme confidence, Vijay Singh has begun the process of putting himself in position to win a golf tournament. Five days after rinsing a 7-iron on the 72nd hole of Bay Hill, 12 days after missing a playoff putt the length of a table leg at the Honda, Singh shot an opening round 67 at TPC-Sawgrass to take the early lead over Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson in this week's Battle of the Big Four.
Instead of being demoralized, Singh hosted his party Monday night, poured liberally from his wine cellar and was his usual gracious self, laughing afterward about how the affair started from one or two guys to what now seems like the entire field. "It's just an outing that I like to invite my friends – and the players are all my friends – and my family," Singh said. "It's great to get together for once. I'm just happy I can do that."
You win 25 times on the PGA Tour and it's easier to serve Opus and put those demons from Mirasol and Arnie's Place behind you. But as machinelike as Singh can seem when he plays golf, he is human, too. He hasn't totally put behind him what happened in Orlando and Palm Beach Gardens. "I mean, it still plays on my mind," Singh admitted in his pre-tournament news conference. "It's nothing that you just kind of forget about a week later. It's disappointing … you get in a situation like that and then you give it away. People play all year to get into that position once and I've done it two weeks in a row."
The thinking is you shouldn't ascend to the No. 1 ranking after back-to-back blown tournaments, but Singh just keeps feeding the computer top-three finishes. In his last three tournaments, he finished third behind Tiger and Phil at Doral, then second twice on the tour's swing up the Florida Turnpike. If his putter were working the way it did in 2004, there would be no question of his position ahead of Woods.
But instead of obsessing about it, trying to "protect," Singh is just playing. He won nine times last year with that approach, overtaking Tiger at the Deutsche Bank Championship before Woods took the ranking back for two weeks after his victory at Doral. "Right now, my goal is to go out and win tournaments," he said. "I really do not worry about the No. 1 position, if it's going to be overtaken or not. If I'm No. 1, it's a great privilege, but it's not my ultimate goal."
Always dogged, Singh is trying a new approach to the Players. The TPC is his home course and the back end of the range should be named in his honor, but overall he has not played well at Sawgrass. The 67 tied his best start since 2001, when he finished second behind Woods. He missed back-to-back cuts in 2002 and 2003.
But that was yesterday and Singh is looking to tomorrow. The man might be bullheaded at times, but he learns from his mistakes and shakes them off as well as anybody in the game. "I've just taken a real relaxed attitude this week," he said. "I think I put too much pressure on myself this week to go out there and play well. This is a big event. I would say in the players' minds, it's a major event ... it'll be one of the biggest achievements of my career if I can win this thing."
Tim Rosaforte is a senior writer for Golf World magazine
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