'Best Putter In The World'
Vijay Singh's new outlook on the greens gives him a Boston win and a commanding FedEx Cup lead
Singh's 34th career win ties him with Mickelson for second place among active tour competitors.
There's a kids' village next to the TPC Boston clubhouse, a wooded picnic area right behind it, and if the 18th green were any closer, the crowd noise would bother the children playing the miniature golf course. Most mornings are cool but sunny, the afternoons as nice as it gets, the perks of a late summer in New England almost worth the five-month prison sentence imposed later in the year by Mother Nature.
You want atmosphere? On Labor Day weekend at the Deutsche Bank Championship in Norton, Mass., the leader boards are full of big names, the grandstands full of people who would expect nothing less and the final rounds notable for producing shifts in the PGA Tour's competitive gravity. Vijay Singh knocked Tiger Woods out of the No. 1 spot in the World Ranking in a head-to-head duel in 2004. Woods blitzed Singh to win the tournament two years later, then lost to Phil Mickelson last August when this event became part of the FedEx Cup playoff series.
Singh's runaway victory in the sixth DBC last Monday -- by five strokes over Mike Weir -- proves that what goes up doesn't necessarily come down. For all the talk about the revised postseason points system and the volatility it promotes, the Big Fijian will tote a 12,225-point lead to this week's BMW Championship. He'll remain in first place regardless of how he fares in St. Louis, and if he makes his tee time all four days -- there is no cut at the 70-man BMW -- there's a good chance he will be unreachable at the season-ending Tour Championship.
A little more than a month ago, the same guy was turning four-foot putts for par into 30-second dramas. Now Singh is ringing up 25-footers in playoffs (the Barclays), 60-footers to slam the door (the 14th hole Monday) and fist-pumping from spots where he once struggled to get down in two. "It's nice to see my ball going in for a change," he confessed after his 34th career triumph, pulling him even with Phil Mickelson for second among active players. "I've been watching everyone else's go in for a long time. It's a great feeling to see my ball rolling into the hole. I mean, there's nothing better."
Or anyone. That $9 million in FedEx Cup cash will buy a man a lot of belly putters, although Singh won't be shopping for a new one after his third win in five weeks. This represents a radical departure from the all-hit, no-roll Vijay who routinely tinkers with his form and equipment in leaner times. Even when he piled up nine Ws in '04, it wasn't because he had tightened up his impersonation of Bobby Locke.
The signature stroke in this win came midway into the final nine, where Singh drove it in the center of the 14th fairway, then yanked his approach to a front-right pin from 170 yards. "I got to the green," Singh recalled, "and I just kept telling my caddie [Chad Reynolds], 'I'm the best putter in the world,' and he'd say, 'Damn right you are, now go ahead and knock it in.' That's just a good attitude. My unconscious mind had a lot of stored-up bad thoughts in there, and that was the key, to get rid of all that."
The putt gave him a five-stroke lead over Weir, which will do wonders for anyone's attitude. Fresh off the 37-footer for a birdie at the 13th, which made the eight-footer for a birdie at the 11th look like a kick-in, the 35-footer Singh poured in for birdie at the 17th could only be described as overkill. He would finish the day having converted about 175 feet of putts, more than his first three rounds combined.
Not even the 12-year-olds were dropping as many bombs at the kids' village. "It was awesome, great to watch," marveled Sergio Garcia, who began the afternoon in a share of third with Singh, then played the last 10 holes in four over to finish T-5. "You guys don't know how good that was, how hard this course was playing. When Vijay is rolling the ball like that, he's very hard to beat."
Actually, Scooby Doo would be a handful rolling it like that. No way would this have happened four years ago, when Singh ruled the golf universe as the game's premier ball-striker and TPC Boston's putting surfaces were akin to a hippopotamus burial ground. Let's just say the original version of this course was not well-liked among tour pros. Shorter hitters despised the goose-necked fairways that narrowed at 275 yards, then turned nice and wide in the 300-yard region.
