Tiger turns his doubts into another great year

LEMONT, Ill. --- Tiger Woods is turning into quite the trivia buff.

During the third round of the Deutsche Bank Championship two weeks ago, he saw a couple of familiar faces as he walked off the 10th tee and approached as if wanting to impart some important information.

"Which city sits on two continents?" he said. "And what country has the most lakes?"

His favorite golf question: The eight major champions with the letter "z" in their surname.

When it comes to his own trivia, Woods often doesn't have a clue.

He kept track of the score at the BMW Championship, which was all that mattered to him. Woods built such a big lead at Cog Hill with his course record Saturday that his only goal for the final round was to break par.

He closed with 68 and won by eight shots.

In an era when a three-shot margin is considered comfortable, this was the fourth consecutive year Woods has won by at least eight, and the 10th time in his PGA Tour career. He was asked whether such big victories give him additional satisfaction.

"First of all, I did not know that," he said with a smile that suggested he was pleased to find out.

Odds are, he isn't aware he tied Sam Snead with his sixth year of six victories or more. Only one other player over the past 25 years has won six times in a season -- Vijay Singh in 2004.

So why does Woods call this one of his best years when he didn't win a major?

Only he can appreciate how badly his ligaments were shredded in his left knee. Only he knows the extent of the surgery, not to mention the eight-month recovery that allowed doubts to invade his mind about how quickly his game would return.

Woods has been saying all summer that he never could have imagined winning so much after such a major surgery. Yet the more he keeps winning, the harder it is to believe him.

"If you would have asked me at the beginning of the year ... any of you guys probably wouldn't have predicted I would have had a year like I did," Woods said Sunday. "To be as consistent as I've been this year, I'm very proud of that."

Even so, consistency is nothing new. Over the past three years, Woods has finished out of the top 10 only seven times in 40 tournaments. Go back to Hoylake for the 2006 British Open, and he has won 52 percent of his PGA Tour events.

Sure, there are some noticeable differences:

- For the first time since he was a 20-year-old rookie, he had a lead in the final round on the PGA Tour and lost. Making it that much worse, it happened in a major, and it was Woods' last chance to win a major this year.

- He failed to win a major, which is how he typically measures a successful year.

- He missed the cut in the British Open for the first time, including two starts as an amateur.

So what makes this year so different? His own doubts.

"There was so many uncertainties at the beginning of the season," Woods said. "I didn't know how the leg was going to respond. I've never had a leg that was stable. What kind of shots could I play? How was my recovery going to be from day-to-day? Am I going to hurt again? A lot of these things, I didn't know.

"To come back and be, as I said, this consistent feels pretty good."