PGA Tour

This isn’t news. The announcement that Tiger Woods would play the Bridgestone Invitational next week is no more surprising than the report that Lindsay Lohan isn’t happy about having to go straight from prison to rehab, missing the get-out-of-jail party. Or that BP fired its CEO. Or that the sun sets in the west.

It would only be news if Tiger weren’t playing in Akron. If you pay attention to all things Eldrick, you know he had this week circled on his handy 2010 desk calendar long, long ago.

It’s true, Woods doesn’t always like to play the week before a major, and the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin is next on the PGA Tour’s agenda.

But he has seven huge reasons to tee it up Aug. 5 at the very beautiful and, for other people, difficult South Course at Firestone Country Club. Reasons one through seven are 1999, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2009 — the years of his previous victories at the event, starting when it was the NEC Invitational and finishing at last year’s Bridgestone, one of the World Golf Championships.

Think about it: Seven’s the career PGA Tour victory total of Zach Johnson. Put another way, it’s Chad Campbell plus John Rollins.

So it’s fair to say that Woods owns this WGC event. This is where he administered a humiliating smackdown to his final-round playing partner Rory Sabbatini after the South African had the temerity to suggest after round three that Woods wasn’t playing his best and might be vulnerable. On that Sunday, a riled-up Woods shot 65 to beat Sabbatini by eight.

Something about Firestone fits Tiger’s eye. It’s as if he arrives in Ohio with a three-shot lead. Hell, he makes birdies blindfolded, or at least in the dark — in 2000, playing in the final group long after the sun had set, he struck a 168-yard eight-iron shot into 18 that no one, not even Woods, could see. Folks in the gallery around the green finally saw the ball when it landed and stuck just inches past the hole. He tapped in for birdie to win by 11.

But now, Tiger has an eighth reason to return to the so-called Rubber City, and right now it’s the most important one. An eighth victory there would be his first in the post-fire hydrant, post-Elin era.

And that’s crucial. If we all can agree that golf’s a head game, and that Tiger’s longtime dominance stemmed in large part from the otherworldly steeliness of his competitive resolve, then we can conclude that his current run of comparatively mediocre play stems from a problem in his noggin.

The logical assumption is that the sex scandal that cost him his marriage has also cost him the confidence that made him the Tour’s alpha dog. It’s tough maintaining that master-of-the-universe attitude after being chased out of your own home by your nine-iron-wielding wife. Whatever the cause, Woods no longer looks like he’s going to win every event he enters. He looks like a guy who can’t keep it in the fairway one day and can’t make a putt the next.

If Woods doesn’t win soon, long-time assumptions will have to be revised. Most importantly, he used to be seen as a lock to overtake Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major-championship wins. But now?

So he has to go to Akron. Firestone has supplied 10 per cent of his tour titles, and Woods needs to win, soon. He needs to buttress his crumbling reputation, to regain that mental edge over opponents and to restore what for him is the natural order — more than just win, he’s supposed to dominate, to loom like a colossus over the golf industry.

He’s needs to get riled up. Maybe Rory Sabbatini will say something imprudent.

Also read:

A (Canadian) Star is born

The next Knudson or Weir

---

James Deacon is a senior writer with golfcanada.ca.Prior to coming to the Globe and Mail in 2006, he was sports editor for Maclean's for 15 years, and a contributing editor to Travel & Leisure Golf magazine for a decade. He's profiled Palmer and Nicklaus, Couples and Norman, Weir and Woods over the years. As a kid, he worked summers as a caddy, attended his first Canadian Open in 1964 and played his first junior tournament in 1965. As an adult, he developed the yips in 2005. He's still hoping they'll go away.