Woods to go toe-to-toe with Williams

Golf:Tiger Woods will almost certainly never say so, but he has probably never wanted to win a game more than he did at Royal Melbourne on the opening day of the Presidents Cup. And the former world number one had captain Fred Couples to thank for setting up a clash with his ex-caddie Steve Williams.

It comes just two weeks after the New Zealander made a comment about Woods which he admitted “could be construed as racist”. Woods and Steve Stricker take on Williams’ new boss Adam Scott and KJ Choi in the last of the six foursomes.

Unlike the Ryder Cup, Couples and International captain Greg Norman take turns in selecting opponents for each of the games.

So when Norman named Choi’s fellow Koreans YE Yang and KT Kim as his fifth pair Couples knew what he was doing when he put Hunter Mahan and David Toms against them.

“Who’s left?” joked assistant captain Jay Haas. Nobody needed telling, of course, that it meant Woods v Scott — or, as many will bill it, Woods v Williams.

“I think it’s great for the tournament — it needed to be done,” Norman said, thereby making even more people believe that it was pre-arranged. While denying that — “it played out the way it played out, there wasn’t any pre-meditation” — Norman conceded he was glad to get the head-to-head out of the way early.

“If we had to defuse anything and just get this thing over and done with, wouldn’t you rather have it sooner than later? I personally wouldn’t have wanted to be sitting down at the singles and all of this pressure is coming on because it’s the first time the two met.”

Couples, who had dinner with Woods four times last week during the Australian Open and presumably discussed how best to play out the controversy, commented: “I think it worked out awesome for everybody involved to have Adam and Tiger play. As we said all along, they are still very good friends.”

Perhaps not as good as they were, though. Scott could have fired Williams after his comment at a caddie awards dinner, but settled for him making an apology and added: “It’s not an issue for me.”

Nor had he taken Williams to task in August for stealing some of the limelight after his victory at the Bridgestone world championship. Williams, sacked by Woods the previous month, gave interviews afterwards calling it the best win of his career, even though he was with Woods for 13 of his 14 majors.

Norman insists: “At the end of the day the atmosphere that will exist walking to the first tee will be exactly the same if none of this took place.”

Maybe that would be true of the players, but certainly not of the watching media and fans.

There had been speculation that Woods would partner Dustin Johnson, but Couples has decided to keep together the pair who won all four of their games together in the American victory in San Francisco two years ago.

That said, the last time Woods and Stricker played together they were thrashed 6&5 in foursomes by Luke Donald and Lee Westwood at last year’s Ryder Cup. Since then, of course, Woods has tumbled from number one in the world to 50th. He is the lowest-ranked member of the American team and needed a wild card pick.

And while he did have his best finish of the year when he was third in Sydney on Sunday, he now has a partner who has not played since September because of injury.

Presidents Cup foursomes(International names first)

Ernie Els (South Africa)/Ryo Ishikawa (Japan) v Bubba Watson/Webb Simpson
Geoff Ogilvy (Australia)/Charl Schwartzel (South Africa) v Bill Haas/Nick Watney
Aaron Baddeley (Australia)/Jason Day (Australia) v Dustin Johnson/Matt Kuchar
Retief Goosen (South Africa)/Robert Allenby (Australia) v Phil Mickelson/Jim Furyk
Kim Kyung-tae (South Korea)/Y.E. Yang (South Korea) v Hunter Mahan/David Toms
Adam Scott (Australia)/K.J. Choi (South Korea) v Tiger Woods/Steve Stricker