Woods Ready for Yet Another Win

Tiger Woods leads by one stroke in the Target World Challenge at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California on Friday. Being the host of the tournament, worth US$5.75 million and featuring 16 players, Woods has already won the event twice in 2001 and 2004.

The winner of the tournament gets US$1.35 million while the player ending up last gets US$170,000.

"Everyone gets a little extra spending money for Christmas," Woods said.

Woods was still finding it tough to get the right pace with the greens at Sherwood Country Club and could birdie only one out of five-par-five holes in it.

With one wrong shot in the wrong direction and one hard hit on the putt from Woods, it looked as though he would lose the game; they turned into pivotal shots for him.

Woods, with his second straight 4-under-par 68 shot, leads Henrik Stenson, a Swedish first-round front-runner with 71 points.

Few sloppy mistakes from Henrik Stenson helped Woods to regain his game from poor beginning. With 8-under 136, Woods is in a good position to win the tournament for third consecutive time, and take away US$5.75 million.

"My iron game wasn't very good. I'm still struggling with my speed on the greens," admitted Woods, who won eight times in 2006 with two major titles among them. "I kept blowing them by the hole today. Luckily a couple of them had train wrecks and went in. Otherwise, it was a little bit of a struggle."

"Two lucky breaks," said Woods, who was at 8-under 136 and in position to win his tournament for the third time in eight years.
Tiger Woods feels that his iron game was not precise and his speed on the greens was lacking after playing four bad birdies.

The last year champion at Sherwood Country club, Luke Donald of Britain returned to 74 with the world number four, Adam Scott ending up last in the 16-player field at 80.