Woods faces uphill battle after long lull

AUGUSTA - Jack Nicklaus can attest to the competitive disadvantage Tiger Woods faces by failing to compete for the last 23 weeks.

After all, Nicklaus' most famous victory - his come-from-behind win at the 1986 Masters at age 46 - was enabled by a similar layoff by a competitor.

Nicklaus recalls Seve Ballesteros bemoaning the state of his golf game before the tournament, saying, "Oh, I haven't played very much this spring. I'm not very sharp. I just haven't had enough competition."

"I kept waiting for Seve to make a mistake all week," Nicklaus said.

And that mistake eventually came, helping Nicklaus charge past his Spanish rival with an historic back-nine push.

Despite the rust, Ballesteros still led the tournament by two strokes on Sunday when he stood in the middle of the 15th fairway - the par-5 hole that played as the easiest birdie on the course all week - with only 210 yards remaining for his second shot.

Ballesteros hit an uncertain 4-iron that hopped into the pond in front of the green and finished with a bogey, followed by another on the par-4 17th. Nicklaus went on to complete a back-nine 30 and edged the leader by two strokes to secure his record sixth green jacket.

"That was purely somebody who had not been playing a lot of competition," Nicklaus said of Ballesteros' mistake on 15. "And if you watched his swing on it, it was quite obvious that he just quit on the shot because he obviously didn't have a positive feeling about himself, and he hit it in the water."

Nicklaus expects Woods to have similar difficulty in this week's Masters, without a competitive round to his credit since mid-November.

In the meantime, the world's most famous golfer has endured well-publicized marital difficulty - the result of his dalliances with an assortment of women.

He makes his official return today, at a tournament he has won four times, so even a long layoff isn't enough to rule him out as a contender this week.

"Tiger not being sharp, he understands that himself, that he is probably not as sharp as he will be a month from now," Nicklaus said. "But, you know, he's here and him not sharp is still pretty good."

Woods shares the Golden Bear's optimism.

He didn't choose to return at Augusta to subtly ease back into the game. He returns with the same objective that has always been at the cen

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