Tiger Woods Press Conference - August 2, 2011

LAURA HILL: Good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome Tiger Woods to the Bridgestone Invitational. Tiger, obviously you're a seven-time winner here but we haven't seen you in 12 weeks. I thought I would give you a chance to give us a little bit of an update on your game, injuries, and coming back out this week.

TIGER WOODS: Yeah, I'm ready to go. Doctors gave me the clearance to go, so here I am. Started back practicing a couple weeks ago, which was nice. I was close to playing last week, but again, docs advised that maybe I'd want to take another week of training and really start pushing it pretty hard, so I did, and I feel good now. It was the right thing to do, and here I am.

Q: How much rust did you feel this morning when you went around for nine? And what are you anticipating in terms of progress this week?

TIGER WOODS: I actually didn't feel any. It's Tuesday. I still haven't been in a competitive environment yet, so that's a totally different atmosphere as you know. But the shots felt very crisp, very clean. I was very pleased. My start lines were good. They were nice and tight, which was good.

So everything that we've been working on we're very pleased with today, and just got to keep working at it. Tomorrow is another day to refine it and be ready to go by Thursday.

Q: I don't know if you're claiming 14 and a half major wins maybe after Darren's victory, he said you were a great help to him texting him. Just your reflections on that week and perhaps maybe you could reveal something you said to him?

TIGER WOODS: Well, that's between Darren and I. He's always been a great friend to me, and we've been great friends for a long time going back to when we both worked with Butch a long time ago. It was great to see Darren play well. He's gone through a lot in his life, and to see him -- I think he's 42 now, to win an Open Championship and the one that he covets the most, that's very special to him, and the way he did it was very impressive. He went out and played very well and really put it on the boys on Sunday, which was good to see.

Q: Just as a follow-up to that, you might be playing with him this week. Thoughts on that?

TIGER WOODS: That's what I heard. I don't know if that's true or not. I thought normally the pairings come out today.

Q: Normally.

TIGER WOODS: Normally (smiling). Are we playing threesomes or twosomes?

LAURA HILL: Twosomes.

Q: Maybe it's tough to answer this: What are the expectations this week given the layoff? And part two, unrelated, are you on any type of ball count or anything in terms of how many hacks in the cages you can take before you go?

TIGER WOODS: No, and same as always, hasn't changed, expectation level.

Q: How frustrating and sort of disappointing to be sitting at home for 12 weeks knowing you can't play golf?

TIGER WOODS: You know, it's -- unfortunately, I've been there before. I've had injuries before in the past, and I've been in similar circumstances where I couldn't play golf, just had to continue training and slowly build up to it. It's really not too hard when I really can't play golf at all. That's not so bad. It gets a little more difficult when you get on that cusp and they start saying, you're pretty close to getting going. I was saying, I feel really good. That's when it becomes a little more difficult is when you're itching to go and they're -- you're borderline whether or not you should go or not.

That's where I've learned a lesson from the past in not coming back too early.

Q: Can you run us through how your leg feels when you're hitting a golf ball, whether it's 100 percent and so forth? And do you have concerns moving forward at all with the left leg?

TIGER WOODS: The great thing is I don't feel a thing. It feels solid, it feels stable, no pain. As I said, that's one of the reasons why I took as long as I did to come back is that I want to get to this point where I can go ahead and start playing golf again like this. It's been a very long time, and it feels good to go out there today and hit balls like this, go practice and feel nothing and walk around and pretty much do anything I want on the golf course. 

Read the full transcript at TigerWoods.com

Source - TigerWoods.com / Press Conference / ASAP Sports