Saw Tiger winning LIVE!

Finally! After all these years of reading about Tiger Woods' exploits, I finally managed to catch him winning live on television. As I had lamented about in an earlier post, Tiger has been in the worst form of his life ever since I moved to the US and so, in every tournament that I have seen, he has never been in contention on a Sunday. But, things finally seem to be picking up for him again this year. He started off the year with a win in Tokyo and then went on to win one of his pet events, the Buick Invitational. He claimed that he had been in bad form last year because he had been working on modifying his swing to adapt to the changes his body was going through, and that those changes were finally coming together now. I don't know if I want to believe that :-) ... but atleast he's back on track now.

Anyway, the tourney where I finally got to see him win was at the Ford Doral championship. I managed to catch the last nine of the final round and the tussle between Tiger and Phil Mickelson was certainly one for the ages. The momentum kept swinging with every hole and finally Tiger managed to win only because Phil *just* missed out on a birdie at the final hole! With the top four - Vijay, Tiger, Ernie and Phil - in such awesome form (all of them have won atleast two tournaments this year), I can hardly wait for the Augusta Masters this week. Hopefully it won't turn out to be a damp squib like The Players Championship last week.

The other champion, Michael Schumacher, with whom I have always had the bad fortune of seeing him win, seems to be in the doldrums for once. Renault is going great guns this season, having already won the first two races and Alonso again securing pole position for today's Bahrain GP. But, looks like Michael is back in contention now with the new F2005 car, as he is back on the front row this time. It will certainly be sad if he again goes on a winning streak now :-( As one of my friends suggested recently, F1 is never going to make much of a sense until all the drivers are given the same car to drive. This is pretty clear from the fact that even though Michael has dominated so heavily in recent years, no one can state with authority that he has achieved all that he has solely because of his ability and not because of Ferrari's advanced car. That certainly does not bode well for the sport!

Anyway, will be back with my comments about The Masters next week.

Cheers,
Harsha