British Open: Muirfield offers Tiger the best chance to end his Major drought

The list of Open champions at Muirfield is a list of Hall of Fame golfers. Harry Vardon won here. So did Walter Hagen. And Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and Tom Watson. Lee Trevino and Nick Faldo too. There isn’t a bum in the bunch.

That’s because Muirfield, more than any other course in the British open rotation, rewards good golf. It is not a “luck-fest”, as former US Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger put it on Monday.

Yes, there are all the sights you expect from a links golf course. There are deep bunkers in awkward places and long, tall grass lurking to swallow any ball that strays from the fairway. But hit the ball in the right places, and you will be rewarded. In that way, it is more like Augusta National than a links course. Augusta rewards golfers who hit the ball to the right spots, particularly on the greens. Muirfield adds another element because of the bounce – it isn’t just target golf – but the end results are similar

“You have to have a good mind game,” Nick Faldo, who won here twice, said. “You have to know where you’re going to land it, where the next bounce is and where the run is.”

Do that, and you will be rewarded at Muirfield. And nobody has a better mind game than Tiger Woods, which is why Muirfield offers him the best chance of ending his major drought. Woods has fought his way back to the top of the game since his career-altering date with a fire-hydrant back in 2009. He is No. 1 in the world and has won four times this year. He just hasn’t been able to lay his hands on a Major championship trophy.

But there isn’t a professional golfer alive who knows his game better than Woods and he always does his homework. He will know exactly what he has to do on every shot and how to do it.

He also won’t be using his driver much during the course of the week. Woods has said Muirfield is playing fast enough for him to leave the driver in the bag, something he did when he last won the British Open at Royal Liverpool in 2006. Errors with the driver are compounded because the ball flies further. Taking it out of the equation means Woods can be even more precise off the tee.

Yes, he made his highest score as a profession at Muirfield – an 81 on a horrible, gray, windy, rainy day. But that has no bearing on this week. It was literally a once-in-a-career bad day at the office. And while he surprisingly talked about the pressure of winning a Major at a press conference this week – it used to be Tiger putting the pressure on the other players – seeing his name at the top of the leaderboard isn’t going to go unnoticed by the rest of the field.

The big unknown, of course, is his elbow. Woods hasn’t played since the US Open last month and says it is fine but he isn’t going to say anything else before a Major. Besides, getting information out of him is harder than getting it out of the US National Security Agency.

So if the elbow is fine, expect Woods to be in contention come Sunday. And don’t be surprised if he ends up as the Champion Golfer of 2013.

With inputs from agencies