Woods couldn’t get up and down from a greenside bunker at the sixth hole, then missed the green long on each of the next two holes and failed to save par. At one point, Woods could be seen leaning forward with his hands on his back, which led to speculation about a possible injury.

Woods cleared that up quickly, though.

“No, it wasn’t my back,” he said. “It was an elephant running over my bag. The whole field ran over me there.”

Still, Woods has a pretty good track record - with or without the 54-hole lead. He’s 37 of 40 on the PGA TOUR when holding at least a share of the top spot, but he’s also come from behind to win 12 times.

The most recent example came at the Buick Invitational earlier this year. He trailed Sergio Garcia and Rod Pampling by one shot and eventually beat Jose Maria Olazabal and Nathan Green in a playoff.

Woods also has an amazing will to win that seemingly allows him turn up the burners when necessary -- like he did a week ago in the final round at Medinah. He did the same on the back nine Saturday, fighting back with birdies at Nos. 13 and 17 to close the gap.

“My body took me out of the tournament, and my mind will bring me back in it,” Woods said. “That’s what I tried to do today. I didn’t hit the ball good, and my speed wasn’t good early. That was all physical mistakes. “But the mind is powerful enough to tell the body what to do, (and) it’ll do it.”

Woods will play with Stewart Cink and Paul Casey in Sunday’s final pairing as he tries to win his fourth straight PGA TOUR event and fifth Bridgestone Invitational overall. First, though, he needed to get some things sorted out on the range.

“It wasn’t like it was just one little thing and it’s fixed and let’s go,” Woods said. “It was a few things that were off today. I’ll do some rehearsals tonight, and hopefully be good tomorrow.”