Tiger Woods ready to get his teeth into Scottsdale

Tiger Woods has opened up on the chip he didn’t want to make — the one to his tooth after getting walloped by a cameraman.

Woods made headlines earlier this month when he was pictured with a tooth missing while watching girlfriend Lindsey Vonn set a new record for women’s alpine skiing World Cup wins in Italy.

Agent Mark Steinberg quickly stated that the tooth had been lost while Woods, who was wearing a partial skeleton mask and sunglasses at the time, had been hit by a camera and the 14-time major winner was happy to explain the situation in a jovial exchange at TPC Scottsdale, where he is playing this week.

“Lindsey had finished (and) I had walked up to the top, I still had my mask on so no-one knew who I was. (I was) trying to blend in because there’s not a lot of brown dudes at ski races,” he joked. “That was the whole idea of why I wore the mask.

“I came up above and I was looking down and all the camera guys were below me on their knees or standing or getting on the ground, moving all around, trying to get a picture because she is hugging people and saying congratulations to the other racers.

“The dude with one of the video cameras on his shoulder was kneeling right in front of me, (he) stood up, turned and caught me square in the mouth.

“He chipped that one, cracked the other one. I’m trying to keep this thing (mask) on so the blood is not all over the place and luckily he hit the one I had the root canal on, that’s the one that chipped.

“The other one had to be fixed as well because that had cracks all through it.”

Woods insists his game was “ahead of schedule” as he prepares for his first event of 2015 at the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

Woods was last in action at the Hero World Challenge in December when he finished joint-last in the 18-man field in a week notable for Woods being physically ill and a series of chipping errors around the greens.

That was his first appearance since missing the cut at the USPGA Championship in August as he continued to struggle with recovery from back surgery.

But after an early morning practice round at a tournament where he has not teed up since 2001, Woods is confident the work he was doing with swing coach Chris Como is beginning to bear fruit.

“It’s great to be back. it’s been a long time since I’ve been back,” he said.

“I had to take a little break there for a while (after the Hero World Challenge), that flu bug got me pretty good for another, probably, three weeks afterwards.

“I lost a lot more weight so I was finally able to start gaining weight again and then start training and then I started practising a little bit with Chris.

“Overall I’m very pleased to go out there and hit shots and I’m cranking up the speed, the speed is coming back up and it’s going to be a fun year.”

Meanwhile two of the stalwarts of the European Ryder Cup team have declared the captain to defend the Ryder Cup against the USA in Minnesota in 2016 will be Darren Clarke or Miguel Angel Jimenez.

World number two Henrik Stenson and sixth-ranked Sergio Garcia both believe it will be a straight fight between the Irishman and the Spaniard over who replaces 2014 skipper Paul McGinley.

“Most likely we’re going to see a race between Darren and Miguel,” Stenson told reporters ahead of this week’s Dubai Desert Classic.

The captain used to be decided by the players but it is now down to a five-man panel that includes former skippers McGinley, Jose Maria Olazabal and Colin Montgomerie.

“They have got enough experience between them to come up with a good decision,” said Swede Stenson who has played in the biennial team event three times.

Asked if Clarke or Jimenez would be the next captain, Garcia replied: “It looks like that. I think those are the two big candidates.