NEW YORK (AP) — The awards are starting to pile up for Tiger Woods again.
Woods has won the points-based award as player of the year from the PGA of America, which was virtually a lock when the FedEx Cup ended and became a mathematical fact this week. His six PGA Tour victories (10 points each) were twice as many as anyone else, and Woods already wrapped up the PGA Tour money list (20 points) and lowest adjusted scoring average (20 points).
It was the 10th time Woods has won the PGA award.
He also wins the Vardon Trophy from the PGA of America and the Byron Nelson Award from the PGA Tour for having the lowest adjusted scoring average at 68.05. It's the eighth time he has won the Vardon.
Woods wins the Arnold Palmer Award on the PGA Tour for winning the money title for the ninth time, earning just more than $10.5 million. Still to be decided is the Jack Nicklaus Trophy for the PGA Tour player of the year, which is a vote of the players. The other candidates likely will be Steve Stricker and Phil Mickelson, with three wins each, or perhaps Y.E. Yang, who won the PGA Championship and Honda Classic. None of the other major champions won more than once.
If Woods were to win PGA Tour player of the year, it would be only the fourth time since it began in 1990 that a player won the award without having won a major. Woods (2003), Greg Norman (1995) and Wayne Levi (1990) were the others.
FRUITLESS FURYK: Jim Furyk ended his 2009 season on the PGA Tour with a 62 in Las Vegas and finished the year with 11 top 10s (second only to Tiger Woods) and nearly $4 million in earnings.
He will start next year with a question that is beginning to bug him.
When is he going to win again?
"I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me," Furyk said. "Not that it's brought up - it's only my fault. I didn't get it done."
Furyk now has gone 54 starts without winning, his longest drought since he went 62 tournaments at the start of his career before winning for the first time in Las Vegas in 1995.
"I'm just not doing enough to keep those rounds going," he said. "When you win a tournament, you always have that one day where you're not really clicking on all cylinders. But you've got to find a way to scratch it out."
SIM STAYS PUT: Michael Sim picked a bad time to win earn an instant promotion to the PGA Tour.
Sim won his third Nationwide Tour event on Aug. 23, right before the FedEx Cup playoffs began. That meant no tournaments in the big leagues for five weeks. And now that the Presidents Cup is over, his luck is not improving.
The Australian did not get in the field in Las Vegas, and he didn't get in the Fry's.com Open this week in Arizona. Instead, Sim is playing the Nationwide Tour Championship this week, with nothing to gain except a chance to build on his record earnings.
PGA Tour officials say Sim will get in the Viking Classic next week. That will give him at least two starts as a PGA Tour member, half as many as Nick Flanagan got in 2007 when he earned his instant promotion.
The Fall Series has some of the weakest fields of the year, although the field in Las Vegas was 18 percent stronger than last year. One reason could be so many players having to wait so long without competing during the playoffs. Along with a week off during the playoffs, there was another week break with the Presidents Cup.
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