Before he teed it up on the first hole at Torrey Pines, Tiger Woods had not played serious, competitive, tournament golf for some 17 months. Five hundred and twenty-two days, to be precise. So nobody—probably least of all, Tiger—was certain just how it would go for him at the Farmers Insurance Open. And when he drove his ball over the right rough and into an adjacent fairway, things did not look promising. The man had returned, but what about his game?
It was a game that had, for a dozen or more years, seemed to occupy another plane. A celestial sort of space forbidden to ordinary, mortal golfers; even the best professionals. Woods won the Masters, arguably golf’s most prestigious—and certainly its most self-congratulatory—tournament in 1997, at age 21, shortly after he had joined the professional tour. And he did not merely win it; he walked away with it. Stole it in broad daylight from people who were accustomed to dueling over championships big and small, the prestigious and the pedestrian. People like Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie. The gods of tournament golf. Woods left them in his wake as he cruised to a record-breaking 12-shot victory.
It was no fluke. He continued to win … to dominate. There were many, many memorable victories, and often as not they were routs. There was, for instance, the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach where he put so much distance (a record-breaking 15 strokes) between himself and the rest of the field that the tournament became a competition between Woods and some sort of Platonic conception of golf. He was straining after perfection.
The numbers are daunting but sterile. Everyone who follows golf knows that he has won 14 of the sport’s “majors.” These would be the U.S. Open, the Open (not to be called, pedants will insist, “the British Open”), the Masters, and the PGA Championship. Jack Nicklaus was generally considered the greatest golfer ever, before the advent of Tiger Woods. He had won a record 18 majors in his formidable career. Nicklaus won the last of the them when he was 46 years old. Woods won his fourteenth when he was 32. It was widely assumed he would pass Nicklaus. That he might even win 20 or more, solidifying his claim to be the best there ever was. Which he was driven to be.
There is another, companion statistic that speaks volumes about Woods and the fierceness of this desire. Until very recently, the number of majors that he had won was greater than the number of tournaments in which he had missed the 36-hole cut. He never showed up with his B-game. If, indeed, he had a B-game. He always came to play and he played an aggressive style of golf that recalled Arnold Palmer and that fans loved. He hit the ball further, off the tee, than almost anyone, but the stupendously long drives were really just a part of his complete game. He could chip. He could putt. He could do it all. He was so complete and so competitive that the field seemed almost to give up before a tournament had even started.
As he was going from glory to glory on the golf course, Woods was becoming one of the most familiar faces in America, not to say the world. And his ubiquity translated into wealth. You could not walk through an airport without seeing his image, much larger than life, smiling back at you to endorse some product or another. He was all over the television. He brought Nike into golf.
Large crowds came out to see him play and millions more watched at home. He was a star of Michael Jordan proportions. In a stuffy old, country club game.
And then …
Well, everyone knows the story. A sex scandal in 2009. Marriage ruined. Image destroyed. It was a fall of epic proportions.
Woods took some time away from golf after the scandal. He made a public apology. His reputation and his earnings took a very large hit. There was no good reason to think that he couldn’t go back out on the tour and win again. And again.
But the body that he had tuned up until it was nearly as perfect as his golf game had begun to fail. He had won his last major tournament before the scandal, the 2008 U.S. Open, on a knee that was operated on eight days later. The ACL was repaired with tendon taken from his right thigh.
There were more injuries and more surgeries after he returned to golf, until it almost began to seem that he was a football player and not a golfer. There were issues with his MCL. His back. His neck. His Achilles tendon. He entered tournaments that he could not finish, like the 2011 Players Championship, where he withdrew after a 42 on the front nine. He was out of golf for the next two months.
The next season, he withdrew after 11 holes of the final round in the Cadillac Championship at Doral. But, then, he won in his next start, in Arnold Palmer’s tournament at Bay Hill. It was the first win since the scandal.
Still, there were more injuries until the latest long layoff during which he underwent two back surgeries. And, then, it was finally back on the course, at Torrey Pines, the course where he had won that U.S. Open, his fourteenth major, back before all the troubles began.
He seemed inevitable and unbeatable back then. But now, playing with two of the game’s best young players, Dustin Johnson and Jason Day, he looked ordinary. Well … not really. Even his misses were somehow special. After that first, wayward drive, he bogeyed the hole. He had trouble all day keeping his tee shots in the fairway, and when he did, he was always first to hit his approach. The kids were outdriving him. Outdriving Tiger Woods. There must have been moments then even Johnson and Day couldn’t quite believe it.
On the back nine, Woods put one tee shot out of bounds. He did manage a birdie on the last hole but finished four over par, far out of the lead and not all that close to the cut line. His partners played indifferently as well.
None of them did much better the next day. And none would play on the weekend. Tiger Woods, in his much-anticipated return to the tour, had missed the sixteenth cut of his career.
The question, now, for Woods and his fans and for the game of golf, which needs him badly for television ratings, is … has it come to an end? Is he over the hill at 41?
It turned out to be a propitious time to be asking that question. That weekend, Roger Federer and Serena Williams would win at the Australian Open. They would be champions of their sport at the age of 35. Tennis would seem to be a game much less friendly to aging athletes than golf. And, while Tiger was struggling at Torrey Pines, Tom Brady was preparing to play in his seventh Super Bowl. He is 39.
These seem to be great days for the old pros in the world of sports, and one wonders if there is one more act in that much-repaired body. Could Tiger Woods become one of those “wily vets” of sports lore?
There were few promising signs at Torrey Pines. But you wouldn’t want to bet against him.
