Best of the Players Championship: The 25 Most Dominant Performances
By Bill Felber
By the 2001 Players, Tiger Woods was as unstoppable a force as the PGA Tour had seen since Byron Nelson’s 11-victory streak of 1945.
Woods came into the event on the heels of having won at Bay Hill the previous week. Since the previous year’s Players, he had won nine of his 20 starts, finished top five in seven others, and only once finished lower than 13th.
Two weeks after the Players, he would complete the “Tiger Slam” with a victory at the Masters.
So it was no surprise when Woods won. Perhaps the larger surprise was that he didn’t dominate. In fact Vijay Singh, the closest thing Woods had to a challenger in those days, gave him a strong run, standing tied with Woods through 54 holes, both at 207 and two behind Jerry Kelly.
Due to bad weather, the leaders only completed nine holes of the final round on Sunday, finishing Monday. By then Woods had caught and passed Kelly, thanks in large measure to an eagle 3 on the par 5 second hole. But that still left Singh, just one behind Woods when the final round resumed on Monday.
The pair exchanged birdies on the 10th and 11th holes, then did the same thing on 12 and 13, leaving Woods one ahead. The turning point came at the par 4 14th when Singh mishit his drive into a pond and took a killing triple bogey. “One bad swing, that’s all it took,” Singh would later say.”
Forced to gamble at the par 5 16th, Singh recorded an eagle, but Woods’ own birdie allowed him to retain a three-stroke advantage that was too much margin for Singh to overcome.
As well as Woods was playing, he almost sounded as if he was taking the victory in stride. “I’m headed in the right direction,” he conceded to reporters.