Tiger Woods once again dominated the field at the Buick Invitational, coasting to victory with his eight shot cushion.

In typical Tiger Woods form, a week of stellar ball striking and putting allowed Woods to build an insurmountable lead over the rest of the competition. What is even more remarkable is that Woods had taken considerable time off from competitive golf and showed few signs of rust. Woods is beginning to evoke whispers of 2000 when he distanced himself from the rest of the PGA Tour. What’s more frightening for the competition are the obvious improvements Woods can still make to his game, "I’m still getting better. I still have holes in my game that I need to fix and need to improve on. I just think that what I’ve been working on, I’m headed in the right direction." Even his competitors are beginning to take notice.  Stewart Cink finished second, as a spectator to the final two rounds, he commented, "I’d say this is the best I’ve seen him play. The Tiger that we saw a year and two years ago, hitting it sort of all over the place, I think that’s a thing of the past. He’s got it geared down and he came and out and played really well."

This is Woods’s 62nd victory on the PGA Tour and ties him with Arnold Palmer on the all time victory list. Now not only is Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors in his sights, but also Sam Snead’s record of 82 career victories. It also marks Woods as an odds-on favorite at the U.S. Open which will be played at Torrey Pines South Course this year. Oddly enough, the last time the U.S. Open was contested on the same course as a PGA Tour event was in 2000 when Woods won both the AT&T and U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. The stars seem to be aligning once again.

However, Woods is skeptical of his chances at running away with the U.S. Open as easily as the Buick. However, Woods downplayed any premonition to this summer, "It’s totally different clubs off tees. Joe and I were talking about today off No. 4, how are you going to keep that ball in the fairway? We hit 3-woods and drivers. During the Open you could see guys hitting irons down there and still have 7-iron to the green. Two totally different sites." Other players were more worried that the USGA would see Woods’s dominant performance as a call to arms to make the course as brutal as possible. “What he’s going to do is screw the U.S. Open up for everyone else,” Fred Couples said. “If he had shot 10 or 11 under, the USGA would have said, ‘Well, maybe we have it in the right spot.’ Now, they may have to regroup a little.”