“Why do you think he’s not going to win this week?” I asked the guy who was right but didn’t know it. “Because he doesn’t know the course, it’s new to him.”

I’m more of a momentum picker than horses for courses, but if I was the latter, I might have told my neighbor that I was pretty sure Tiger had done well in the recent life of this tournament. I would have been right because in the three years the Deutsche Bank has been played at the TPC of Boston, Tiger’s finished T7 (’03), T2 (’04) and T40 last year, when he shot a 65 on Thursday, best round of that day. I’d say he doesn’t have too many problems with the course.

The bar tender has a 50-50 chance, and probably better, of winning with Tiger. With Sunday’s playoff win at the WGC event, he did, in fact, win his fourth in a row, and his sixth out of only thirteen tournaments played this year. The “probably better” aspect is the four in a row, the fact that the Tiger of 2000, a version of which I’d predicted we’d see at the start of the year, has now come. He may better those gaudy 2000 numbers by the time November rolls around, as he won 9 of 20 in 2000, and if he wins out this year he’ll have a higher winning percentage. The only question is if this jaunt to Ireland before the Deutsche Bank is going to catch up with him after a round or two. But I have to figure that since he outlasted a late charge by Stewart Cink last Sunday, then took advantage of Cink’s inability to close it with putts on the first two playoff holes, followed with a dart in the rain to Cink’s approach in the sand on the third playoff hole, that since he won despite his best game, he feels pretty much invincible right now, and may be looking to Thanksgiving the way Warren Zevon thought about life: I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Jet lag? Fatigue? Not now.