A follow up, yesterday Mickelson,Woods and Scott teed off, here are the results.

Mickelson was the group’s medalist, posting an even-par 71. Woods finished with a 1-over 72; Scott with a 73. None of the three were at their sharpest, but Woods and Scott had reason excuses. Woods was playing his first competitive round since having loose cartilage removed from his knee the day after the Masters, and Scott was playing with a broken right hand, the result of being slammed in a car door in London.
Mickelson opened with four consecutive pars before making bogeys at the fifth, sixth and seventh holes.

“I guess I could say it was rust or I just made a couple of dumb mistakes,” said Mickelson, who three-putted from 40 feet on the fifth, then hacked from rough to bunker to green and had two putts on both the sixth and seventh. At the time, Mickelson’s decision to keep his driver at home in favor of a fourth wedge was looking questionable.“My game plan was that I only want to hit it a certain distance, I don’t really want to hit it past 300 yards on most of the par 4s because it starts running into the rough,” he said. “And I felt like with the fairways being firm like they were today all I needed was 3-wood on the holes.”

Meanwhile, Woods opened with a double-bogey 6 and managed to work his way back to 1 under at the turn on the strength of birdies at four, eight and nine. “Hey, you couldn’t have asked for a worse start than I got off to,” he said. “I figured you’re going to make bogeys out here. I just happened to make two on the very first hole. I just wanted to be patient, because there is a long way to go and see if I can get this thing to even par or under par for the day.”

The momentum began to move in Mickelson’s direction when he rang up his first birdie at the 414-yard, par-4 10th hole. He bogeyed the 12th, then posted successive birdies at the 13th and 14th holes.Mickelson added his last birdie at the par-5 closing hole. His eagle attempt from 30 feet tracked toward the hole before slipping past on the high side. Woods, who looked to have his game working on nearly all cylinders after the opening hole, began to struggle on the back nine. His card shows a double-bogey 6 on the par-4 14th as his only blemish, but he needed par-save putts of 20 and 15 feet, respectively, at the 12th and 13th hole. Then he punctuated an up-and-down par save from a greenside bunker at the 15th with a patented fist pump. At the 18th, he reached the green in two and then three-putted. Woods was well aware that his 72 keeps him very much in contention, and that he just needs to clean up a few areas in his game.  Friday will bring a sequel to “The Show.” The pairing goes off from the 10th hole at 1:36 p.m. local time.

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