Tiger Woods is well on the way back to becoming a force in the game again after a torrid 2015, his niece Cheyenne Woods said on Wednesday.
The LPGA Tour rookie said it had been great to see her famous uncle return to form at the PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championships last week and that “he’s only going to get better from here”.
Tiger was in contention going into the last round after stringing together rounds of 64, 65 and 68 – his best scoring sequence for two years.
A final round even-par 70 left him four shots behind winner Davis Love, but it importantly meant a first top-10 finish since 2013. It left Tiger ending his season on a relative high with “plenty of positives” to reflect on after missing cuts in the last three majors and slipping as low as 286th in the world rankings.
Tiger’s niece said: “I think we saw this past weekend that things are starting to come full circle and he’s playing great golf. It’s exciting to see and he’s only going to get better from here, I’m sure.”
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Cheyenne will play in the LPGA Tour’s “Asian swing” for the first time this year which begins at the Sime Darby Championship in Kuala Lumpur in October. She is just 25 but admits to occasionally feeling old when she looks at the young talent taking both the men’s and women’s game by storm.
Jordan Spieth, 22, has won two majors this year, while women’s world No 2 Lydia Ko is just 18 and Brooke Henderson this month became only the third player to win an LPGA event before her 18th birthday, after Ko and Lexi Thompson.
“I have played with Brooke a few times. I consider myself pretty young at the age of 25 but she is 17 or 18 – very mature for her age – but to see how well she is doing, it does make me feel a little old,” she added.
“Their emergence is a great shift for the sport. It makes the game a little bit more relevant for the younger teenagers and makes it a little bit more cool.”
