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Tiger Woods doesn't get knocked often in the golf media, but NBC's Johnny Miller launched a couple of shots off the tee yesterday.
With his usual candour and edge, Miller said Woods made a mistake and was perhaps presumptuous to speculate in January that winning golf's Grand Slam was “easily within reach.”
“I'm not taking a slam at Tiger,” said Miller, during a conference call to publicize NBC's coverage of The Players Championship at the Sawgrass golf course in Florida.
“But I think the Grand Slam is something you start thinking about on the first of August, after you've won the three other ones.”
Woods, recovering from an arthroscopic knee operation, isn't competing at Sawgrass. Given Woods's poor results at the tournament, Miller says he picked the perfect time to undergo surgery.
“Tiger Woods hasn't exactly lit in up here,” he said. “He's had five rounds of 75 in the last four years. There's no other championship I know where he's shot five 75s.”
Miller recited Woods's finishes since winning the event in 2001 – consistently out of the top 10, tied for 53rd in 2005 and tied for 37th last year.
“For Tiger, that's as bad as you can possibly do,” he said. “So, I can see why his knee needed to be operated on.”
Miller was challenged by his NBC colleagues for arguing TPC, because of its strong field and fat purse, is equal to or ahead of the PGA Championship in terms of prestige, behind the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open.
“It's a clear fifth in my book,” Roger Maltbie said. “It has the best field of probably any event played throughout in entire year. … But that said, it's not one of the big four, and I just don't see how that's going to change.”
Said Gary Koch: “This whole fifth major stuff gets a little tiresome. I think it's pretty clear cut. We've got four major championships – and The Players Championship.
Miller reached for his 2-iron.
“All I'm saying is that if you had a player survey … there probably would be a reasonable amount of guys on Tour who would rank [TPC] either a clear fourth or tied for fourth. You definitely would get some votes for that, I promise you.”
“I doubt it,” Maltbie said.
The Golf Channel will provide TPC coverage today and tomorrow from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET. NBC's weekend telecasts will air 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Cliff's world
How can anyone take seriously Toronto Maple Leaf interim general manager Cliff Fletcher, when he says, as he did yesterday, that the NHL's best coaching candidates will patiently wait for the Leaf job, and reject other offers, until the club is able to find a general manager, because coaching in Toronto is the NHL's “plum” assignment?
Or his response to a question, during the news conference announcing coach Paul Maurice's dismissal, about the state of the Leaf organization. “It's not in as much flux and transition as you suggest,” he said.
Or, this one from Fletcher: The Leaf search committee will make the correct choice for general manager, because agent Gord Kirke is involved.
This was the best: “We're operating a normal operation here.”
AM640 Toronto commentator Bill Watters looked at it another way. “Dysfunctional is a complimentary term,” to describe Leafs management, he said this week.
We'll argue Maurice should have been fired when Fletcher took over in January. Instead, he kept his job and knocked himself out to get the team in the playoffs, but failed. As a result, the Leafs missed out on a lottery pick. Fletcher insisted yesterday that he had a plan. Another good one.
Playoff audiences
The CBC's second-round playoff audiences were down 11 per cent from last year, mainly because only one Canadian team, the Montreal Canadiens, participated. Last year, two, the Ottawa Senators and the Vancouver Canucks, were in the second round.
The Philadelphia Flyers-Canadiens series averaged an impressive 1.764 million a game on the CBC. New York Rangers-Pittsburgh Penguins had an average of 978,000.
The network's overall second-round average was 1.370 million compared with 1.537 million in 2007.
RDS's telecasts of the Flyers-Habs series were watched by a huge average audience of 1.836 million, bringing total average viewership for the series to 3.6 million.
