The last remaining piece of the old Tiger Woods is now gone
NAPA, Calif. — The surprise came in the certainty.
On Friday, news broke that Tiger Woods would finally be on the golf course, this time sans the earpiece and, interlocked fingers crossed, sans any injury. Actually playing golf at this week's Safeway Open. For the first time in Tiger’s career, he was taking the appropriate time away from the game to get totally healthy, hinting over the last 14 months about a return to the game when he felt he could compete without a bad knee or a bum back or an Achilles hiccup.
On Monday, that illusion went away when Woods withdrew.
When you look back at the career of Tiger Woods, an incredible career that will go down as one of the most impressive in a short amount of time that the sports world has ever seen, it’ll be easy to forget about all the injuries that he’s suffered.
Dating all the way back to 1994, when Tiger had his first knee surgery, we’ve seen Woods struggle to keep his body up. Speculation runs rampant on this subject, of course, but the violent move that made Tiger the ultra-superstar that he was, and still is, is the same move that probably caused a lot of the problems he’s suffered now.
So many times in his career, Tiger pushed his luck. He came back early. He ignored doctors and experts that told him to hang up his spikes for the season, with the most famous example arguably being his pinnacle moment, a one-legged effort at Torrey Pines during the 2008 U.S. Open that saw an injured Tiger battle the next up in a long list of surprise characters for 91 holes until he was finally too much, and Woods claimed a 14th major title.
But all of those stories of Tiger were so long ago. The Tiger we know now, the one that fans expected to see this week here at the Silverado Resort and Spa, was as much of an unknown as a college kid giving up his amateur status to try golf out as a professional. Some make it, most don’t, and trying to figure out which ones will be successful is tougher than trying to figure out why the same golf swing can cause a golf ball to miss 40 yards left one time and 40 yards right another.
The golf world was abuzz for a return to a golf tournament that, honestly, wouldn’t normally rate as a top-15 sporting event of this upcoming weekend. According to ESPN’s Darren Rovell, 28,000 tickets were sold when Tiger announced he would be in the field. Stephen Curry, the most popular athlete in the world right now, committed to playing alongside Woods in the pro-am. Phil Mickelson, Tiger’s arch rival during his prime, brought up the idea of playing next to Tiger for the opening two rounds, a dream to any golf fan that is starting to see a little gray show up around the ears.
But since Torrey Pines, nothing about Tiger’s life and career has made a ton of sense, and so Monday morning he suddenly pulled out of this and one other tournament he had committed to play, writing on his website, “I know that I am not yet ready to play on the PGA TOUR or compete in Turkey. My health is good, and I feel strong, but my game is vulnerable and not where it needs to be.”
It was as honest as Tiger Woods has maybe ever been about his golf game, a man that made famous the idea that he wasn’t planning on teeing it up at an event unless he thought he could win. When he came back from injury at the 2014 Hero World Challenge, he conjured up ideas of Sam Snead and Tom Watson, reminding us that golf is a game that can be played at the highest level well into ones 50s.
“There's other ways to go around a golf course, and I think that's when it's really neat to be part of a sport in which you can play for such a long period of time, and you can win at a very late age because you don't have to physically dominate anybody,” Woods said in December of ’14. “You don't have to physically beat anybody. You just have to beat the golf course.”
In 2010, when Tiger was making his return to golf after off-course issues that dominated the news cycle, his mentality was no different.
“Nothing's changed,” he said at Augusta National that year. "(I’m) going to go out there and try to win this thing.”
This recent announcement, and the quote on his site, suggest that that type of mentality are as far gone as the Tiger Woods that intimidated the golf world with his distance off the tee and his fearless attitude at the highest of moments.
Tiger is vulnerable. He’s defeated. For a man that never lost anything for the better part of 35 years, Woods continues to be beaten up by the game that brought him everything one could want and have in life.
Silverado isn’t Augusta National or Oakmont. It’s not St. Andrews or Pebble Beach or Winged Foot or even Erin Hills, host of next year's U.S. Open.
You know those people that have let themselves gain some weight and have that euphoric moment to start battling back? That first mile is the hardest, but that’s the idea — you’ve got to at least put one foot in front of the other even if you look silly doing it. That was supposed to be this week for Woods. He wasn’t supposed to win. Nobody that has any idea about the current state of the PGA Tour would have thought that was a logical conclusion. But he was supposed to get up off the couch and put that first foot down.
But he can’t. His golf game won’t allow him. Two weeks ago Tiger spent the week at the Ryder Cup, around the best golfers in the world playing in one of the grandest stages the sport provides. Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed and Jordan Spieth were out there drawing over the blueprint that Tiger himself mocked up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. They grew up watching this legend play a sport in a way nobody had ever seen, and Tiger, in a golf cart using his mind as a tool for an American team that needed every edge possible, saw golf played in a way that, maybe, he can’t process anymore.
That might be sad to some. It might be a bummer to sports fans that were hoping to see the start of something special. Tiger Woods, back on the golf course, slashing 2-irons down fairways and forcing Goodyear blimps to recalculate flight plans to avoid his 5-irons.
But that’s the issue here. It’s just our hope as golf fans, a little past the actual reality.
What is in the cards is a door opening for a young player with a ton of talent. With Tiger’s withdrawing, 25-year-old Max Homa is now in the field at the Safeway. A guy that looked up to Tiger as a kid, Homa won his second Web.com Tour event in 2016 and was at the Monday qualifier when he got word he was in the field thanks to Tiger’s withdrawal.
Asked about Tiger pulling out, Homa told me, “It’s obviously bittersweet. Tiger is one of my golf heroes and he is great for the game so it’s tough to see him withdraw, but I’m extremely thankful for the opportunity to play and I am looking to make the most of it and hopefully play like Tiger this week.”
And just like Tiger of old, Homa, who says he probably knows 90 percent of Tiger’s stats and records over his career, is teeing it up in Tiger’s place with the exact mentality that Woods used to bring to the course.
Does Homa think he can win this week?
“Yes, I do. It’s just four days of golf, and maybe I have Tiger’s mojo with me.”
Tiger might not be around Silverado this week, but what he did for golf looms large over this field. His golf game might never be what it once was, but his legacy will remain.
This sport is now full of Tigers. It’s just without the one most people wanted to see.
