Alive And Kicking
Tiger Woods may have been the big winner at the BMW Championship, but 29 other players were content to at least qualify for the Tour Championship
Tiger Woods' dominant win obscured the real drama going on behind him.
LEMONT, Ill. -- Here is your FedEx Cup playoffs status report, in brief:
Tiger Woods leads, after throwing a monkey wrench into Cog Hill again on Sunday when he eased his way to a three-under 68 that won the BMW Championship by eight shots. It looked more like eight miles.
Woods' sixth PGA Tour victory of the year and 71st of his career also marked the 10th time he has won by eight shots or more.
"There are certain times I get rolling," Woods said.
This week was one of them. His rounds of 68-67-62-68 and 19-under total of 265 was eight shots ahead of Jim Furyk and Marc Leishman. Woods cut his work short on the greens. He needed just 106 putts in four days and he had 36 one-putt greens.
"You have to make putts to win championships," he said. "This week I certainly made my share."
Woods' victory might have been a foregone conclusion on Saturday when he constructed a seven-shot lead, but it was still a busy closing day Sunday at Cog Hill:
• Brandt Snedeker needed just a bogey on the last hole to qualify for the Tour Championship, but he missed his 12-foot par putt, then a three-foot come-backer. Then his tap-in lipped out and he four-putted for a triple bogey. He said goodbye to a trip to Atlanta.
"I just started thinking about the wrong things, man," Snedeker said. "I didn't concentrate over the bogey putt and I was thinking about all the stuff the Tour Championship comes with and I did everything you're not supposed to do."
The three-footer was ugly, Snedeker said.
"I just yipped it," he said. "I mean it was a full-out yip."
Snedeker's gaffe moved John Senden into the 30th and final spot for Atlanta -- by a margin of .45 of a point over Ian Poulter.
• Woods finished the day with a 1,504 lead in points over No. 2 Steve Stricker, but because the points are reset to make the Tour Championship more compelling, it got chopped down to 250 points.
"That's just our new system," Woods said. "I guess the tour wants to have excitement at the last event ... [and] that certainly builds some excitement.
"It's a sprint, a one-tournament sprint."
• The top four players at the conclusion of last year's playoffs at the Tour Championship -- Vijay Singh, Camilo Villegas, Sergio Garcia and Anthony Kim -- didn't qualify and they aren't coming back this year. Singh never even made it to Cog Hill.
• Mike Weir, who knocked it in the water on the last hole thinking he needed to make birdie, made bogey instead, thought he was toast, was wrong, still qualified for the playoffs and was pleased.
• Villegas, who won two of the four FedEx Cup playoff tournaments a year ago (including the Tour Championship), shot 31 on the back for a 66, missed out on the finale, pondered whether five-under was enough and was not happy.
"Enough?" Villegas said. "For what? It's totally enough to have three weeks off."
• Stewart Cink, who joined Weir and Stricker complaining about back pain Sunday, was five-under in a four-hole stretch on the front and squeaked in at No. 26. He started the day at No. 32.
He said the playoffs are all about stress.
"It needs to be," Cink said. "That's what makes our sport compelling. There's leader stress, there's cut stress, there's who's going to make the Tour Championship, who's going to make the Presidents Cup and the Ryder Cup. There's all kinds of stress at different levels."
If Cink had missed, it would have meant that in back-to-back years the British Open winner missed qualifying for the Tour Championship. Padraig Harrington, who won the British Open plus the PGA Championship in 2008, never made it to East Lake.
That place marks the end of the road for the FedEx Cup playoffs and all it stands for. Sure, the gleaming, modern FedEx Cup trophy looks nice and it might one day mean even more than it does now, but at this point in the history of these golf playoffs, it's still mostly about the money. And there are huge piles of it in Atlanta -- $7.5 million in tournament prize money and $35 million more in bonus money. Last place a year ago at East Lake was still worth $112,000. After the computers stopped whirring Sunday at Cog Hill, they figured out just who has a chance to make some more money at East Lake ... and who doesn't.
The 69 players in the field knew there was no cut at the BMW Championship, at least not the usual 36-hole one.
