Woods slogs way to finish line at Players, suggests way to fix slow-play issue

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- Pardon our admittedly limited German, but for Tiger Woods, it was a day of disparate halves at the Players Championship.

A front nein and a back nine.

Woods finished with a 1-over 73 in the final round at TPC Sawgrass, after shooting a bogey-scarred 40 on the outgoing half that wrecked any chance of having a decent result this week.

“Back nine was good,” he said. “Front nine, not so good.”

As he signed his card, Woods was locked in a tie for 39th, which represented his second-worst result at Sawgrass when he has played all 72 holes. He finished T53 in 2005.

Woods insisted that his day wasn't nearly as ragged as the score would indicate, and he said the round-ruining double-bogey he made on the fourth hole, when he knocked his approach into the lake fronting the green, wasn't a mistake. He got hit by some wind, he said.

“I got smoked,” Woods said.

Woods has managed a score in the 60s in one of his past 12 rounds spanning four different venues and said a recovery shot he had at the sixth Sunday was a succinct snapshot of his week at Sawgrass.

"I pulled my tee shot in there and I had just a nasty lie out of the fairway bunker. It was sitting down, ball above my feet, and I hit it just absolutely perfect -- into the worst spot you could possibly put yourself," he said of the sixth, which he bogeyed. "Kind of summed up the week right there."

Since winning at Bay Hill in March, Woods finished T40 at the Masters, missed the cut at Quail Hollow last week and broke par only once in four rounds at Sawgrass.

Woods also had a few suggestions about what might be done to speed up the pace of play, which has been a hot-button issue all week, starting with commissioner Tim Finchem's insistence earlier in the week that penalty strokes are not the solution.

Woods said warnings should be eliminated and that players should be hit with penalty strokes as soon as they get a bad time.

"If you get a warning, you get a penalty," he said. "I think that would speed it up."

As far as anybody knows, no player has been assessed a one-shot penalty in 20 years, so the current system of fines is not working.

"Strokes is money," Woods said.

The grammar wasn't perfect, but the point was.