THE hardest fair golf course I have ever played.

This was the view of Tiger Woods after he had failed yet again in a major championship, this time the US PGA at Oak Hill.

He may still be the runaway world number one but it is now unarguable that the rest are catching up, especially on the big occasions. Woods yesterday shot 73 for ten over 292 and that was never going to be close enough to end his major drought now dating back to last year’s US Open.

He wasn’t using the difficulty of the course as an excuse for his latest failure, rather was he more than a little disgusted at how rarely he was able to hit the fairways. “Calc (Mark Calcavecchia) was the only one out there missing more fairways than I was,” he smiled ruefully. The statistics support that view.