Woods wins Zozo, ties Snead with 82nd Tour title

CHIBA, Japan — The journey to Japan was ostensibly about fulfilling corporate obligations, participating in a made-for-TV exhibition and getting in some reps following knee surgery and physical challenges that dogged Tiger Woods’ throughout the summer.

Nobody — including Woods, if he is honest — was thinking about a victory, or a record-tying one at that.

Nonetheless, Woods finished the final round of the Zozo Championship on Monday, holding off Hideki Matsuyama to win his 82nd career PGA Tour title, matching a 54-year-old record long-ago credited to Snead, who notched the final victory of his Hall of Fame career in 1965 at age 52.

The victory came in Woods’ first start of the 2019-20 season at the first PGA Tour event contested in Japan. Despite his summer physical woes, Woods has three PGA Tour victories in his past 14 starts.

Woods shot a final-round 67 to complete the tournament at 19-under 261. Matsuyama was 3 shots back. Rory McIlroy and Sungjae Im tied for third.

That Woods managed to pull it off at Accordia Golf Narashino Country Club is just as extraordinary — in its own way — as his winning last year’s Tour Championship and capturing the Masters for his 15th major title.

Those tournaments are bigger and carry far more weight in the game, but Woods was trending toward those triumphs. He showed plenty of form going into each tournament, and it was hardly a surprise at the time that he won either event.

A week ago, nobody knew what kind of game he had, least of all himself. Woods opened 40-1 at Caesars and closed at 30-1 when the tournament started.

It was only a month ago that he began playing golf again after arthroscopic knee surgery on Aug. 20. Woods admitted that all of his golf in recent weeks was in a cart. “It’s a little bit different than when you have to walk out here,” he said.

When he competed in the skins game challenge along with Matsuyama, Rory McIlroy and Jason Day on Oct. 21, his game was so sketchy early on that he missed a par-3 green so badly his ball hit a cart path and rolled halfway back to the tee.

Then he opened the tournament Thursday with three consecutive bogeys — according to Elias, no player dating to 1983 had won a tournament after doing that — and it seemed that it might be a struggle for him to be respectable.

But Woods turned it around in a big way. He made nine birdies in his final 14 holes to tie Gary Woodland for the first-round lead with a 64. After a day off due to storms, he had seven more birdies in round two to take a 2-shot advantage through 36 holes. A third-round 66 meant a 3-shot lead over Matsuyama after 54 holes; he had won all 24 previous times that he held an advantage that large.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to score as well as I have,” Woods said. “It normally takes some time to do that.”

When play was suspended Sunday, Woods still led by three. But the temperature was considerably cooler than it had been all week, and he appeared to be a bit stiff, certainly compared to the fluid movement he had shown throughout the tournament.

He bogeyed the tough par-4 12th, the lead dropped to two, and Matsuyama missed a 3-footer for birdie on the 14th that would have cut Woods’ lead to 1. Instead, Woods made a nice birdie putt at the 14th to increase his lead back to three.

When Matsuyama birdied the 16th, Woods again led by just two. But a miss from 15 feet at the 17th by Matsuyama meant a 2-shot cushion with two holes to play.

“If I do what I’m supposed to do and get the job done, then I get a W,” Woods said prior to the final seven holes. “I guess that will add up to the number 82, but my main focus is to do what I need to do and get the W first.”

Woods, at age 43, got the Tiger WW for the 82nd time on the PGA Tour — some 23 years after he got his first as a 20-year-old in his first few weeks as a pro when he won the Las Vegas Invitational in a sudden-death playoff over Davis Love III.

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