ORLANDO – This is news. Really. Tiger Woods can’t buy a putt.

The man who finds a hole in the ground more easily than Bugs Bunny is having a frustrating time at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, an event he used to own but lately has come to be a bit of a thorn in his side. He won four in a row from 2000-03 but hasn’t much sniffed at the lead since, his sense of smell perhaps affected by his bloodhound pursuit of major championships.

Or maybe Palmer is just exacting a little revenge for getting passed last month for third place on the all-time PGA Tour victory list.

Anyway, Woods carded a 2-under-par 68 at Bay Hill Club Friday, which is good if you’re playing in the weekday four-ball, but with defending champion Vijay Singh shooting 65 and streaking to 9 under par for the tournament, this is called losing ground.

Tiger, seven behind at 2-under 138, doesn’t like to lose – unless it’s several extra thousand pounds he lugs around at a tournament in the form of the usual media posse. Losing is about the only thing he might lose sleep over. Of course, this doesn’t happen very often for a man with 63 Tour titles in 192 starts.

The problem this week, primarily, is the shape of the greens. They’re OK for the rest of the field, but Woods, ever the perfectionist, hasn’t been able to adjust. They’re a little too slow, a little too bumpy, a little too uncooperative.

“I'll have to play better and make a lot more putts than I have been. I just never got the speed of these things today,” Woods said after needing 30 putts, one more than during his opening 70. “I kept leaving them short and had a hard time getting to the hole.

“The Tour Championship they were slow, but they were smoother. These are slow and … like I said yesterday, the hard part was every green is slightly different speeds, and I have to make the adjustments and I was struggling to make the adjustment today.”

Lots of players wielded hot putters on Friday, including Trevor Immelman and Brian Davis, who each shot 64. They didn’t need more than 23 and 24 putts, respectively. Singh had 28 putts, but solved the problem another way, chipping in twice, once for birdie and once for eagle in a round of 65.

Though the greens at Bay Hill are slow, they are still quite good despite a nematode infestation that had the Tour and club staff scrambling. Imperfections are part of golf, the only sport played on a natural surface at all times. But Woods is an artist who through excellence and will brings a level of certainty to an unpredictable endeavor.

He stopped going to the regular PGA Tour stop at Pebble Beach — the place where he won the 2000 U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes — because of the somewhat bumpy poa annua greens along the Monterey Peninsula. You cannot dominate if nature isn’t willing to conspire with you.

What’s funny is that Woods, though arduous mental conditioning by his father, is better equipped than any of his peers to deal with ancillary distractions and other challenges. Yet greens that do not meet his standards seem to behave as a kind of kryptonite.

This is logical. A man who expects no less than perfection of himself has to be psychologically compromised by the prospect of such intolerable vicissitudes.

And the result is that he is a bit off kilter through the bag. “I just wasn't swinging the club very well today, and when I did put myself in position to make a putt, I didn't make them,” he said.

It happens to everyone, even Tiger Woods, who is seven behind a respected front-runner and in danger of losing for the second time in 10 starts.

Well, no one is perfect.