Watching Tiger Woods playing over the last 3 weeks has been truly awesome. Mixed in with some great play by Phil Mickelson, Steve Stricker (in particular), Rory Sabitini, and Steve Verplank the FedEx Cup was actually more entertaining that I first thought it would.

Saturday at East Lake was particularly inspired with the play of Geoof Olgilvy (62) and by Zach Johnson’s 60. Who says low scores aren’t fun to watch. But none of them could do much more than creep up on Tiger’s 63 for the day… and none could duplicate their scores of Saturday to make a run on Sunday.

Tiger’s 2007 season with the 7 wins could have been even more spectacular if not for putting well at the Master’s and the US Open.

And the scary part is he looks more comfortable driving the golf ball than ever. If he continues to hit 60-70% of the fairways as he has in this latest run, look out even more. Another amazing stat that came out this week: Tiger is#1 in closest to the hole from 150-175 yards and from 175-200 yards on tour. He doesn’t even need a driver, so what happens when he really gets comfortable as he is now?

Siting needing to keep a balance in his life, Phil sticks it to the commissioner and decides not to show up at Cog Hill.

I think Phil will be roundly criticized for this decision taking some of the pressure off of Tiger’s decision the prior week for almost the same reasons.

Actually I think the competition of the FedEx has been better than I would have thought. When you get this many great players on really good and fair golf courses, the talent really gets going. Now we’ve had two great finishes in successive weeks, great TV indeed.

So maybe the commissioner got someting right after all.

I think Brandel Chamblee of the Golf Channel said it right on Monday evening (I paraphrase): “Phil has as much talent as Tiger, he just hasn’t been able to show it consistently.”

Mickelson 23 putts on Sunday. Woods was putting for eagles on 4 holes and played them 3 under. Mickelson wasn’t putting for eagle on any of them and played them 4 under. Woods shoot 4 under pa while taking 32 putts. You can argue that this is another event that Tiger should have and could have won if his putting had been sharper. but that is how good it gets at this level and how putting is what really separates the end of the day. Mickelson hit like 51 of 53 putts inside of 8 feet… give me a break.

But even more amazing is that Phil won with a triple bogie on Friday and a double bogie on Monday! I can’t even imagine making a triple bogie and still shooting under par for the day.

Now Phil is thinking about not playing at Cog Hill. Now that would be fun. I hope he plays!