Tiger hoping practice will make perfect

TIGER WOODS has been out on the Turnberry links for the last two mornings while the vast majority of us were still fast asleep.

He was sticking to his policy of playing his practice rounds at the crack of dawn when he knows he will have the place to himself. With another 18 holes behind him yesterday, he was hard at work on the practice putting green before 10.30am. It is Woods’s first visit to Turnberry so he will almost certainly play at least one more full round before going into action at 9.09am on Thursday morning alongside Lee Westwood, the English golfer who got to within a shot of Woods in last year’s US Open at Torrey Pines, and the Japanese teenager Ryo Ishikawa.

Few players like to find themselves in the same group as Woods or even in the match immediately ahead of or behind the runaway world number one. It will be nothing new for Westwood, however, as he partnered Tiger in the final round of the 2008 US Open at Torrey Pines and only gave best at the very final hole where Woods holed an 18-foot birdie putt to force a play-off against Rocco Mediate.