The Hole Story by Craig DeVrieze

 The only reason Tiger Woods’ re-appearance at the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship made sense was a sponsorship agreement Woods has with Accenture.

Woods’ competitive nature is matched only by his shrewd capacity for making a buck — and stroking a sponsor in today’s economy isn’t a bad idea even for the most marketable icon in sport.

From a competitive standpoint, however, the risk was considerable.

Even for the typically indomitable Woods, match play is a crapshoot.

Yes. Even after his Thursday second-round loss to Tim Clark — who’s  best known in these environs for letting a three-shot lead with five holes get away vs. Jonathan Byrd two JDCs back — Woods sports an incomparable  32-7 record over 11 years of the match play.

But on the trophy heisting front, that makes him un-Tiger-like 3-8 in the event.

Point being, this particular title is a tough son-of-gun to win, even for the best golfer ever to tee up a Titleist. And especially for one that hasn’t played competitively in eight months.

At match play, there is no room for one bad day. It is six separate sprints, whereas stroke play is a four-round marathon.

Give Tiger four rounds against the field, and the field has its hands full. Especially in these $8 million World Golf Championship parties. Take away Match Play, Woods’ record in those deals is 12-for-17.

What?

Shut up!

What I’m saying is that, if our man was intent on making a triumphant return — the only proper way, after all, to follow up that epic, one-legged Open win last June — Woods would have been better served by waiting three weeks and hitching his star to the WGC CA Championship in Miami.

That’s at the Blue Monster at Doral Golf Resort and Spa, a place where Tiger has won an unconscionable 8 of the last 11 tournaments.

Eight out of 11?

Do you realize how stupid good that is?

Anyway, that’s where we are all but certain to see him next. And, if you, like my Mom, are mourning Tiger’s Thursday fate, chill.

Says here he wins in Miami.

Ain’t I bold?

In 2005, Michelle Wie nearly made the cut at the John Deere Classic and nearly won three LPGA Tour majors.

A year later, she nearly played her way into the men’s U.S. Open and nearly scored her first LPGA title at the Evian Masters.

Then, she nearly disappeared.

That’s why Wie’s newest near miss — a runner-up finish at last week’s SBS Open in her native Hawaii — is more good news than bad for we Wie fans, never mind that she again showed that distressing inability to close that made her “The Nearly Girl” in her mid-teens.

Wie had a three-shot lead with eight holes to go Saturday before suffering a double-bogey on the 11th hole and a bogey at 17.

JDC/Wie fans will recall that a double-bogey at Deere Run’s 6th hole followed by a bogey at 7 cost the then-amateur sensation a chance to become the first woman in 60 years to make a PGA Tour cut on what was her second-round back nine in 2005.

In each of her four previous LPGA Tour seconds, a loose late swing could be fingered as a culprit as well.

The SBS winner was Angela Stanford — how’s that for irony? Isn’t Wie, still a Bay Area collegian, losing to someone named Angela Stanford a little like Michael Jordan losing to someone named Sam North Carolina?

Stanford said she saw evidence that her teen-aged foil still has to learn how to win.

“She was doing everything she needed to win, and when she made the mistake on 11, she didn’t rebound like I thought,” said Stanford, an LPGA vet who has won three of her last seven starts. “You could see her youth in that.”

And yet and still, what you also could see throughout the three-round tourney in Hawaii was Wie’s immense talent, and, by reports, a return to the languid and fluid swing that earned a 13-year-old Wie her comparisons to Ernie Els.

That’s a significant and important change from 2007, when Wie seemed to have lost her way and her game, literally missing fairways left and right with a swing many thought went off-track when she tried to match the men she played at Deere Run and elsewhere in length.

“She seems to have the rhythm back in her swing,” wrote Golf Digest’s Ron Sirak, who has chronicled Wie’s career through the good and bad. “That wonderful Big Wiesy tempo … is back.”

The legion of Wie bashers, a few of whom certainly will be checking in at the bottom of this blog, long ago forgot that Wie, now a college sophomore, was and is just a kid, a youngster learning her way against the most compelling competition she could challenge.

 She still just is 19 years old and her first year as a full-fledged member of the LPGA Tour.

Her best golf remains ahead of her. And here’s guessing it shows up soon.

“The Nearly Girl” is nearly gone.

I withhold his e-mail address only because he works for a sister publication, but Loren Nelson of the North County Times near San Diego won’t be getting any pressroom pork chops if ever he comes “slumming” at the John Deere Classic.

Nelson went for the tired tractor jab in likening a Buick Invitational without Tiger Woods this week to our mid-summer JDC.

“If San Diego were Silvis, Ill.,” Mr. Big City said, “and Tiger Woods were Kenny Perry, and everyone in LaJolla drove lawn tractors to the convenience store, then this week’s Buick Invitational would be the biggest spectacle ever to hit town.”

Nelson goes on to refer to Ryder Cupper Perry, who only won his 13th Tour title Sunday in a little burgh called Phoenix, as “winner of the tractor-sponsored event last year in the middle-of-nowhere Midwest.”

Nelson’s point, such as it was, was that without Woods, who typically plays the San Diego tourney but is sitting out this year with an injury, the Buick might as well be our JDC.

“Yeah, we’re spoiled,” Nelson wrote. “With all due respect to the John Deere Classic, this ain’t the John Deere Classic.”

Well, at least he gave us our due respect …

Never mind that the argument is  dumb – Phil Mickelson, Padraig Harrington and Retief Goosen,among others, are in the San Diego field — it’s also the same old arrogant nonsense lazy writers trot out whenever they are looking to demean one event or another by making mock of our smalltown affair.

Well, here’s the deal. We are a little out in the middle of the Midwestern nowhere, and we kind of like it that way. And we, most of us anyway, respect the level of talent on display in any PGA Tour event enough to get by-golly- excited when serious players like Perry and J.B. Holmes and Woody Austin and Zach Johnson come and show us their stuff.

In short, we are what Nelson isn’t — educated golf fans who know the game is bigger even than Tiger Woods.

Now, if you don’t mind, I believe I’ll get on my tractor and go home.