By PETER KERASOTIS
Florida Today

ORLANDO, Fla. - Brad Faxon didn't think Tiger Woods was going to throw it in reverse. Not with a 5-shot lead going into the final round of a tournament he'd already won three consecutive times. So it came as no surprise to him, or anyone else for that matter, when Woods took his lead and stretched it to an 11-shot victory, widening the gap even further between him and the 'B' flight that is the rest of the PGA Tour.

"Look," Faxon said, trying to put it all in perspective with a popular PGA metaphor, "it's not like Tiger's going to throw up all over himself." He paused.

"Did I just say that?"

He laughed. Everybody laughed. Because, you see, Tiger Woods played the final round at the Bay Hill Invitational dry heaving, often doubled over in sickness. No, he didn't throw up all over himself Sunday, but he came close. And the night before, his condition was a little more severe, with the description of his heaves a little more graphic. "I was dehydrated from throwing up and the other thing that was going on," Woods said with a wane smile.

We really don't need to go into the "other thing that was going on," but we can say that Woods became fast friends with Immodium-D. Tiger thinks it was food poisoning that got him, but given that his girlfriend, Elin Nordegren, fainted from apparent food poisoning Friday afternoon, it's likely they both have some type of flu bug. Whatever the malady, it kept Woods up and in the bathroom most of Saturday night. He didn't even try to sleep in his bed, preferring instead to stay on a couch at his home in Orlando's exclusive Windermere community. "The couch was the closest point to the bathroom as any in the house," he said. "I made my runs nice and short. It was a very long night." It was an even longer day.

Not just for him, but for the rest of the PGA Tour's players, who today must be suffering from a different kind of sickness. For them, it is the sickness that comes from the realization that just when they hoped they could close the gap between themselves and Woods, the gap widens. Not only aren't these guys in the same area as Woods, they aren't even in the same area code.

Not rain, nor mud, nor diarrhea, nor heaves, nor dehydration, nor lack of sleep, can keep this guy from performing on a golf course better than anyone else in the world.

Not even the postman delivers like this.

It wasn't that it rained occasionally Sunday. It rained all day, nonstop, making conditions muddy and sloppy. And Woods' abdominal muscles hurt so much from vomiting - he said he did so some "20 to 30 times" Saturday night - that it hurt him to swing a golf club.

Yet he was the only player Sunday to not bogey a hole. And only two golfers - Adam Scott and J.L. Lewis - shot a better round Sunday than Woods. Scott and Lewis both shot a 67. Woods shot a 68. "I'm very proud of this round," Tiger said. "Even though I didn't feel my best, I was able to go out there and make no bogeys, with the lead. That's always something you want to do."

If he were not in contention, Woods said he would not have played Sunday. He actually thought about checking into a hospital, "but the problem is, it's so easy to check into a hospital, but getting out is the hard part, you know. Even though I just wanted to get an IV drip to build up my fluid level, I decided not to do that."

Coming off knee surgery that caused him to miss six weeks of playing earlier this year, Woods has now won three of the four PGA Tour events he's entered. With the Bay Hill Invitational, he's now made 100 cuts in a row. He's also won Bay Hill four consecutive times, and nobody has done that with a PGA Tour event since 1930, when Gene Sarazen won the Miami Open his fourth consecutive time.

That was back during the Hoover Administration. "You run out of superlatives in describing the guy," Faxon said. And he said that before Sunday's final round, before Tiger's legend had another chapter written, before he found another gear, even through steady rain and sickness.

It is one thing to be the best when you're at your best. It's another to do what Tiger did Sunday, during the final round of the Bay Hill Invitational. He began the day with a 5-stroke lead and ended 11 shots ahead of his closest competitor, if he can be said to have such things. You see, his only competition is himself.

And history.

Tiger is only 27 and already he's won 37 PGA Tour events. His best year was 2000, when he won three majors and 11 PGA events. With his knee surgery now out of the way, he feels better now than he has in a long while. "I feel just as good as I did in 2000," he said, before adding after a slight pause and a smile, "excluding today."