Woods’ retirement fears allayed
Fifteen-time major winner has fifth back operation Mcilroy tips the 45-year-old to bounce back from surgery
As the world of golf once again descended into the despair of fearing the end of Tiger Woods’s career, so two of his closest allies played down the significance of his fifth back operation. “I’m not worried about Tiger,” said Justin Thomas, the world No3. “I will never be worried about his ability to play until he literally can’t walk any more.”
Woods can still walk, despite the hysteria that greeted his revelation late on Tuesday night that he would miss his first two scheduled tournaments of the year – next week’s Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines and next month’s Genesis Open in LA – after a “procedure to remove a pressurised disc fragment that was pinching his nerve”.
Considering the 45-year-old’s history on the operating table – he underwent a spinal fusion in April 2007 that kept him out for eight months – it was inevitable people would write him off, with Brandel Chamblee, the Golf Channel analyst, quick to pen the obit, adding: “My guess is a full, unrestricted swing would have made him even longer and he would have played uninjured his entire career and likely would have won 100 regular tour events and 25 majors.”
However, with Rory Mcilroy revealing on the eve of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship yesterday “that Tiger actually had this done on the 23 December and was back on his feet the very next day”, and with Notah Begay III, Woods’s long-time friend, explaining he was hitting balls on Tuesday, “getting a feel for the game after the surgery and seeing how everything is”, the panic subsided considerably.
Optimistic: Rory Mcilroy believes Tiger Woods will be ‘just fine’ after surgery
“I don’t think we should read too much into this,” Mcilroy added. “They were just cleaning up a couple of bits. He’ll be just fine. I mean, he won the Masters [in 2019] with four back surgeries, so there’s not much Tiger Woods can’t do.”
Thomas concurred. “The fact that Tiger’s been through all this before helps him, because he knows how to recuperate and recover better after each procedure,” he said.
In contrast to the vast majority of his admirers, who seemed to believe the fusion surgery was a cure for the long-standing injury that almost led him to quit in the early part of 2017, Woods was well aware that another meeting with the knife was almost certain. “If your goal is cure, that isn’t what this is going to offer,” said Dr Steven Atlas, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard. “Once they have that fusion, it can’t be undone and it is likely that they will have future surgery down the road.”
After seeing his swing speed fall below 115mph in a 2020 that featured him only playing nine times, recording one top 10, with his world ranking falling from sixth to 44th, Woods is hopeful this microdiscectomy can effect a return to the form that led him to his 15th major at the 2019 Masters.
“It was like the first time in 30 years he swung that slow,” Begay told USA Today. “And that was due to a lot of factors. Old age was one of them, but having nerve pain in your body is going to prevent you putting everything you can into it.”
Meanwhile, there is an $8 million tournament starting today and it says plenty about the enduring fascination with Woods that his health overshadowed the final preparations for the European Tour’s opening event of 2021. Mcilroy and Thomas go out alongside defending champion Lee Westwood this morning, with Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Fitzpatrick and Justin Rose also teeing it up.