Tiger Woods returns for the PGA Championship at Harding Park, a course with bite by the bay

Hugging Lake Merced in the western part of the city, inland but not all that inland, Harding Park got named for golf aficionado Warren G. Harding, the Ohioan who became the 29th U.S. president but died both in office and in San Francisco. It’s a muni that held tour events in the 1960s until it reeled into a disrepair that saw it serve as a parking lot for the 1998 U.S. Open at nearby Olympic, an alleged nadir people often reference because people underrate the value of parking lots. As it holds the 102nd PGA Championship after the novel coronavirus pandemic shoved it from May to August, it’s as good a place as any and a better place than most.

It even has a new statue, one hardy enough to weather getting hurled into a field in Missouri during a nonfatal truck accident on its trek west from Philadelphia, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. It depicts late lawyer and former U.S. Golf Association president Sandy Tatum, who lived from 1920 to 2017 and shepherded Harding Park’s resurgence, and it so happens there’s a contestant in the field who first met Tatum while a 14-year-old pup playing juniors with lavish promise.

That would be Tiger Woods, and he would be the field’s ultimate tour guide for this unfamiliar course.

Of course, besides Woods’s excellence in the 2009 Presidents Cup for “Captain Freddie,” as Woods put it here Tuesday referring to Fred Couples, Harding Park also conjures one prevailing thought for any golf-addled brain. It’s that time Woods edged John Daly in a deafening playoff at the American Express in October 2005, and Daly promptly took his new $750,000 to Las Vegas, found his way to that rare $5,000 slot machine and eventually to one of the utmost passages of American literature, scolding himself in his memoir, “In less than five hours, I lost $1.65 million.”

Woods, of course, went to Stanford for two years, and he knows well his way from Palo Alto through the 40 minutes and plummeting degrees to San Francisco’s Sunset District here. For the many who haven’t played the course — there was that match-play event in 2015, won by Rory McIlroy over Gary Woodland in the final — he can illuminate.

“Yeah, I mean, I played it before the redo,” he said, as can not many.

Continuing: “It’s heavy air whether the wind blows or not, but it’s still going to be heavy. The ball doesn’t fly very far here. I’ve known that from all the years and all the times I’ve had to qualify up in this area. It’s always 20 degrees cooler here than it is down there in Palo Alto. We knew that coming in. I think the weather forecast is supposed to be like this all week: marine layer, cool, windy, and we are all going to have to deal with it.”

In fact, of all the ways to view Northern California through the years, here’s an eccentric one: It’s where the wine flows and the golf balls don’t. Tony Finau, the No. 17 player in the world, reckons Northern California might lead the world in golf-ball laziness.

“It’s crazy,” he said, “how short the golf ball goes here in Northern California. I played Olympic Club quite a few times growing up, San Francisco Country Club. I don’t think the ball travels shorter anywhere in the world than here in Northern California. There’s definitely a part in this week that we’re going to have to adjust for, and I’ll definitely be doing my homework on that these next couple days.”

Justin Thomas, who won Sunday in Memphis and pipped Jon Rahm for No. 1, Thomas’s second tour of the perch, told of 30-yard differences between the heat spots and here. During practice here, he said, “I was getting ball speeds if I really cranked one out here, I was getting 74, something like that. Pretty much all of them were in the 70 to 72 range, whereas the same thing in Memphis, I was getting 77 to 81. It is quite a difference. But at the same time it is not happening only to me.”

Woods, nowadays 44 and with just one tournament in the stash since the PGA Tour resumed ball-banging in June, said he would have to “make sure my core stays warm.” He added, “I know I won’t have the same range of motion as I would back home in Florida where it’s 95 every day.”

Asked if, 13 years since his fourth and last PGA title, he thought he could win, he answered effusively.

“Of course,” he said in full.

For Rahm’s part, he said, “Where I grew up in Spain” — in the north, along the Atlantic — “is pretty much like this.”

Thomas extolled the PGA Championship’s range of courses, calling this “way different from Quail Hollow” where he won in Charlotte in 2017, but said it should prove tougher than most of its brethren strewn around the country. Everyone and Brooks Koepka stressed it might be even more urgent than usual to keep the drives from misbehaving.

“If you’re in that rough, there’s no chance you’re hitting 4- or 5-irons into these greens. You have to drive it well and put it into the fairway,” said Koepka, who is aiming to become the first man since Walter Hagen in the 1920s to win the PGA Championship thrice consecutively.

That rough, enriched by whatever mist and rain might goad it, seems to crave a role here, perhaps steeped in fickleness. “Well, it’s definitely thick enough this week to be a factor,” Finau said. “I played the back nine for the first time [Tuesday], and I think it’s about a 50-50 chance as far as the lie. I’ve had two lies yesterday on hole 12 that were three feet apart. One, I could easily get a 7-iron on, and the other one I was just trying to hack out 40, 50 yards. It’s almost luck of the draw when you hit it in the rough. You’re going to see some guys get fortunate and hit it onto the green, and I think you’ll see some guys hack it out and not hit it anywhere.”

Said the tour guide Woods: “It’s a par-70, it’s not as long numbers-wise, but the ball never goes very far here. This golf course in particular, the big holes are big and the shorter holes are small. It can be misleading. They have pinched in the fairways a little bit and the rough is thick; it’s lush. With this marine layer here and the way it’s going to be the rest of the week, the rough is only going to get thicker, so it’s going to put a premium on getting the ball in play.”

Eventually, he warbled about the Stanford days, about “the first time I ever lived away from home,” and “being around so many intellectually curious people,” and “all the qualifiers that we had to play up here … in all different types of weather,” altogether “great memories and great times, and ones that I thoroughly miss.”

A blip later, he brings his big major history and his Harding history to a place without major history, yet the place with the first major at a hard time in history.