Tiger Woods Can't Hurry Love

US Ryder Cup captain Davis Love III believes Tiger Woods can play in this year's match with Europe, but his injuries have been "underestimated".

Woods, 40, has not played competitively since August and has had three back operations in the last 18 months.

On Tuesday he tweeted a clip of himself hitting a ball into a virtual screen and wrote: "Progressing nicely."

Love said: "If he can play 10 or 12 tournaments in a row, I think he can get his game back and make our team."

Woods, who has spent a record 683 weeks as world number one, is now ranked 445th and his agent Mark Steinberg recently denied reports that the 14-time major winner had suffered a setback with his rehabilitation.

A winner of 79 PGA Tour events, Woods is one of Love's vice-captains for the Ryder Cup at Hazeltine as the US attempt to halt a run of three successive defeats, and has targeted becoming the first playing vice-captain in the history of the event.

"Tiger is very adamant he can handle both roles," Love told BBC World News. "I think Tiger will work hard enough, if his body will allow it.

"If he keeps stopping and starting - and the injuries keep piling up - it's going to be tough for him, but he's very determined. We've seen that."

Woods played only 11 events in 2015, carding his worst round as a professional with a 13-over-par 85 at the Memorial Tournament in June.

He missed the cut at The Open and PGA Championship but, in his final event before injury, he posted rounds of 64 and 65 in finishing in a tie for 10th at the Wyndham Championship.

"We've underestimated his injuries," Love said. "He has really been held down the last few years, but he can play.

"Get him out there on the golf course and he still wants to do it. He just needs a full season, like any athlete, to get himself straightened out."

The Ryder Cup runs from 30 September to 2 October.

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Cardinals Escape Packers in Overtime

Larry Fitzgerald’s brief but brilliant overtime heroics trumped another Aaron Rodgers Hail Mary and the Arizona Cardinals escaped with a 26-20 victory over the Green Bay Packers on Saturday night to advance to the NFC championship.

Fitzgerald turned a short pass into a 75-yard gain on the first play of overtime to set up his five-yard shovel pass reception for the winning score as the crowd chanted “Larry, Larry.”

The Cardinals (14-3), the No2 seed in the NFC West, plays the winner of Sunday’s Seattle-Carolina game for the title.

It can’t be as crazy as this one, which unfolded on the same field where the Cardinals beat the Packers in overtime 51-45 in a wildcard game in the 2009 season and where Arizona routed Green Bay 38-8 three weeks ago.

Rodgers, in a play reminiscent of his final-play heave against Detroit this season, took the snap with five seconds to go in regulation, scrambled around and heaved it 41 yards to the end zone.

Jeff Janis, a 6ft 3in receiver pressed into extended duty because Green Bay’s top two receivers were hurt, outjumped defenders Patrick Peterson and Rashad Johnson and clutched the ball to his chest as he fell to the turf in the silence of University of Phoenix Stadium.

Arizona won the overtime coin toss — after the referees declared the first toss hadn’t flipped — and on the first play, no one was covering Fitzgerald, who caught and ran through defenders to the five-yard line.

A strange play had given Arizona a 20-13 lead with 3:44 to play in the fourth quarter. Damarious Randall, who moments earlier had made a key interception in the end zone, deflected a pass intended for Fitzgerald inside the five-yard line and the ball sailed into the end zone into the hands of Michael Floyd for a nine-yard TD catch. Floyd also had an eight-yard touchdown catch in the first quarter.

The Packers (11-7) took the kickoff but went nowhere and turned the ball over on downs, setting up Chandler Catanzaro’s 38-yard field goal that put Arizona up 20-13.

With 55 seconds to go in the fourth quarter, Green Bay were pushed back into a fourth-and-20 situation at their four-yard line when Rodgers scrambled and threw 60 yards to Janis at the 36. A penalty pushed it back to the 41 and Rodgers threw incomplete before getting off his last, great completion.

Janis, who caught seven passes for 145 yards after having just two receptions all year, was hurt on his big catch and was helped out of the end zone.

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Phelps Admits Dark Thoughts - SI

Michael Phelps, the American swimmer whose 22 Olympic medals make him the most decorated Olympian of all time, has revealed that he was “in a really dark place” after he was arrested last year for drunk-driving – and admitted to feelings of “not wanting to be alive anymore.”

Phelps, who has 18 gold medals from three Olympic Games, describes his arrest and subsequent emotions in a revealing interview in Sports Illustrated, and recalls lying low at his home in Baltimore as news media were camped outside. “I was in a really dark place,” Phelps told SI. “Not wanting to be alive any more.”

Shortly after his arrest, he entered a treatment facility in Arizona. He says his 45-day stint rejuvenated him, but at the time he felt frightened. “Hug-hug, kiss-kiss, turn in my phone and go to my room. It’s probably the most afraid I’ve ever felt in my life.”

Phelps was pulled over in September 2014 after being clocked doing 84mph in a 45mph zone in Baltimore. He failed two sobriety tests and was charged with DUI, excessive speed and crossing double lane lines. “I just put my head on the desk,” his mother Debbie told SI. “I thought, Oh, my God, here we go again. How terrible is the world going to be to my son?”

Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, echoed Debbie Phelps’s concerns: “I had been living in fear that I was going to get a call that something had happened. Honestly, I thought, the way he was going, he was going to kill himself. Not take his own life, but something like the DUI, but worse.”

Phelps pleaded guilty to drunk-driving in December and was given one-year suspended sentence and 18 months of supervised probation, but avoided jail time. “The last three months of my life have been some of the hardest times I’ve ever gone through,” Phelps said on the courthouse steps after his hearing. “Some of the biggest learning experiences that I’ve ever had, finding out a lot about myself. For this day, I’m happy to be moving forward, and I’ll continue to grow from this.

“I look back now,” says Phelps says in Sport Illustrated. “I lived in a bubble for a long time.”

After the spell in rehab, Phelps got back in the pool. He returned to training last fall, and has worked hard to cultivate a leaner and more muscular physique. After been dropped from the US team for the 2015 world swimming championships in Russia this summer, Phelps competed in the US nationals instead, and won gold in three events, in each posting the fastest time of the year so far.

He has not drunk alcohol since his arrest, and has vowed not to drink until the Rio Olympics are finished next August. After years of enduring workouts with a hangover, Phelps is training clean. “Haven’t had a single sip and will not have a sip. The performances were there because I worked, recovered, slept and took care of myself more than I ever had.”

“I’m back to being the little kid who once said anything is possible,” Phelps says in SI. “You’re going to see a different me than you saw in any of the other Olympics.”

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