At the Buick Open, you better make a lot of birdies. Twelve months ago, Vijay Singh won his fourth tournament of the year (he would go on to win five more before the season was done) with a four-round total of 265 – 23 under par. In 2003, Jim Furyk landed the top prize with 21 under. Since 2000, in fact, the winner at Warwick Hills GC in Grand Blanc, Mich., hosting the event this weekend for the 39th time, has averaged an incredible 21.6 under par. And that’s still a bit more than four shots behind the 72-hole record – Robert Wrenn’s 26-under in 1987.

You get the idea. Eking out a few hard-fought 71s really doesn’t cut the mustard at Warwick Hills. Shoot two of them, in fact, and you probably won’t even make the cut. Twelve months ago, only those at four under or better after 36 holes got to stay on for the weekend.

At 7,127 yards, Warwick Hills could never be described as easy, but unless you’ve been locked in a cupboard since the Titleist Pro-V1 was launched, you will know that 7,127 yards no longer puts the fear of God into card-carrying members of the PGA Tour. A look at the last four winners, however – Singh, Furyk, Tiger Woods, and Kenny Perry – will tell you that this Joe Lee design won’t lie down and succumb to just any old hack.

Opened in 1957, but redesigned by Lee in 1969, Warwick Hills is very popular among Tour players and something of a throwback – a stylish and sophisticated test that bears more than a passing resemblance to a traditional U.S. Open venue. What distinguishes the home of the Buick Open from the Shinnecock Hills of 2004 or this year’s Pinehurst is large soft greens and generous landing areas that encourage big hitters to take it as far down the fairway as they can.

TV viewers will, therefore, rarely see players reaching for a 3-iron on the tee. Many of the fairways are guarded by bunkers, but it is a careless drive that finds them. And with greens averaging 8,000 square feet – 2,000 more than the norm for a PGA Tour green – competitors should have no problem improving their Greens in Regulation stat.

It can be difficult getting a feel for exactly how hard to hit the approach shot, such is the immense size of the putting surfaces, but compared with those that competitors faced at the Old Course in St. Andrews two weeks ago, the greens at Warwick Hills are relatively benign. “The greens are always perfect,” Woods said last year. “That’s partly why the scores are so low.”

Warwick Hills is, in a nutshell, a course where the best are allowed to shine. There are few strange bounces, bad lies, or uneven stances. Turn up with a game in half-decent shape, and the class players in the field are going to make some serious hay.

“It’s a shootout,” Furyk said in 2004. “You have to make a lot of birdies. It’s an exciting back nine, some short irons in your hand sprinkled with some really tough holes. I don’t know if any lead is really all that safe on this golf course.”

And who better to take advantage of such an amenable layout than the man currently leading the Par Breaker statistical category on this year’s PGA Tour, the man who, with 223 birdies and six eagles in 48 rounds, is beating par 26.5% of the time? Who better to crush a mediocre field (only four of the world’s top 20 are playing) than the man who, two weeks ago at the Open Championship, had the best of the rest quaking in their boots and stopping only a notch short of saying he was unbeatable?

Call me crazy, but my pick this week is Tiger Woods.

Seems he is now perfectly at ease with the new swing. Seems he is strutting around the course with that look in his eye again, the look that says simply; I am better at this than you. And with one win (2002) and four top-four finishes in six visits to the Buick, seems he likes Warwick Hills, too.

One of Tiger’s biggest challenges will obviously come from two-time Buick Open champion and last year’s winner, Singh, who outranks Tiger this season in Greens Hit (71.8% to 71.2%) and Driving Accuracy (62.3% to 57.2%).With easily accessible par fives (Singh was 10-under par for the tournament’s 16 par fives last year) and some fairly undemanding greens, Warwick Hills couldn’t be more suited to Singh’s game if the Fijian had designed it himself.

The world no. 2 hasn’t won since May and, despite top-10 finishes at both the U.S. and British Opens, hasn’t really been in the thick of things since that spring victory at the Wachovia. What’s happened? Singh has forgotten how to putt.

After finishing no lower than 37th in putting average since 2000, Singh has plummeted to no. 72 this year.

If Singh doesn’t get it going, the major threat to Woods might come from Furyk, who took Tiger on in the final round of the Western Open three weeks ago and refused to yield. That win was the highlight of three very solid months for Furyk, in which he also finished second three times and rose to no. 9 in the world rankings after having dropped to no. 32 at the start of the year.

Furyk missed the cut at St. Andrews after admitting to not having a clue how to play the course, but he clearly has Warwick Hills’ number. He won here two years ago, hasn’t been outside the top ten since 2000, and has been under par in his last 25 rounds.

As for a long shot, how about John Daly, who is well-suited to the course, as he demonstrated last year with a final-round 66. Scott Verplank will be confident following his runner-up finish to Ben Crane last week in Milwaukee, and Woody Austin, who won here in 1995 and has recorded a total of seven top-25 finishes in 10 appearances, should be a factor.

And you can’t rule out Chris DiMarco, Stuart Appleby, or Players Champion Fred Funk, either, even if they have only one measly top 10 between them in the last two months.

Looking for a winner further down than that, however, might be a waste of time. Every 156-man field on the PGA Tour possesses dozens of players capable of winning a tournament at some time or other. But not this week. The Tiger is looking formidable again, and this is a course he can humble.