Tiger, a cut below!

With only a golf hole between them, Tiger Woods and his caddie, Steve Williams, paced the final green at the Cottonwood Valley Course on Fri...

With only a golf hole between them, Tiger Woods and his caddie, Steve Williams, paced the final green at the Cottonwood Valley Course on Friday, inspecting the blades of grass, trying to decode one last riddle in the sun.

“Outside right edge,” Williams said above the silence, and Woods was soon standing over his ball for a 15-foot putt for par to extend one of the records he cherishes most. Woods struck the ball and awaited its verdict. It rolled on a line but strayed to the right of the hole, ending his streak of consecutive cuts made on the PGA Tour at 142

“I’m not going to make it,” Woods said after crunching the numbers from a second-round 2-over-par 72 on Friday to finish the Byron Nelson Championship at one-over-par 141. The cut fell at 140.

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Woods’ streak dated to the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in February 1998, when he withdrew after shooting four over par for two rounds of an event that was shortened to 54 holes and postponed until August. Before Friday, Woods’ only other missed cut was at the 1997 Canadian Open.

He had constructed a streak so sturdy that no end seemed in sight. It had come to personify his dominance on the PGA Tour as much as any other achievement. Eight of his nine major championships came during his run. Last month, he won the Masters.

But in wind gusts of up to 30 mph, Woods’ swing betrayed him on a course he knows well. He hit only four of 14 fairways and said he would soon be on airplane back to Orlando, Fla., where a session at the gym and the driving range awaited him. “I couldn’t quite find what I needed to make the right golf swing,” said Woods, who shot a first-round 69. “I tried to bandage my way to the finish.”

Woods’ short week came in a tournament he won in 1997 and with a host, Byron Nelson, who held the record of consecutive cuts made at 113 until Woods passed him in 2003. As Woods tacked onto the record, some compared it to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941.

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Woods scrambled to make the cut several times during his run, including at the 2003 Masters when he got up-and-down from a greenside bunker and made the cut on the number. In March, at the Players Championship, he finished 36 holes at 1 over par to make the cut by a shot.

(The New York Times)