Pain-free Tiger eyes Open start
BETHESDA, Md. − Tiger Woods has always been fond of saying, “it’s a process” and for once, he’s spot on.
In the first nine holes he played since his back surgery, he broke 50, “just like when I was 3,” he said. Playing with his buddy, Champions Tour player John Cook, he was hitting his 8-irons the distance of wedges.
“Cookie came back from breaking his back and he was actually hitting it further than I was. So that’s not good,” Woods said at his pre-tournament press conference at the Quicken Loans National. “So I’m pumping 8-irons 135 and that’s all I had. But things have turned around and I’ve got my numbers back.
“No, it’s been an interesting road . . . quite a tedious process,” he said. “But I’m good enough to play and I’m going to give it a go.”
Ahead of schedule but rusty, Woods makes his much-anticipated return from surgery for a pinched nerve at the tournament he hosts at Congressional Country Club, teeing off with Jason Day and Jordan Spieth at 8:12 a.m. Thursday. While, “expectations don’t change,” he said, this week shapes up as a conditioning assignment in Double A, all leading up to next month’s British Open.
“If this wasn’t the foundation and our impact that we can have with kids, I probably would not,” he said. “Our goal was the British Open. I healed extremely fast. Once I got back to where I was playing golf and knocking off rust and playing, shaping shots, looking at holes, strategizing how to play them, things started coming back quickly. Lo and behold, here we are.”
Woods, who has dialed back his swing with coach Sean Foley, concedes that he doesn’t have his explosiveness back.
“It still hasn’t happened, not to the level that I’m used to. That’s going to come in time,” he said, noting that he has been able to do explosive lifts in the weight room
GETTY (which may have gotten him into trouble in the first place).
Still, Woods says it’s the first time he’s been pain-free in two years, a period that includes an Achilles injury in 2012 when he won five times. The Barclays was played at Bethpage that year, and that’s when the back spasms first appeared. He blamed it on a hard hotel bed and blew it off. But by last year’s Barclays at Liberty National, the pain was sharp enough to bring him to his knees, and it would only get worse.
“Pre-procedure, right before I went in, I wasn’t able to function. I couldn’t get out of bed. I just couldn’t do any normal activities. When I blew out my knee and even had my Achilles problems, I could still do things. I would still be able to function. This was different. Anyone who’s had any kind of nerve impingement, it’s no joke. That part was relieved as soon as I got out of the surgery. I was able to do things, and do things that I normally took for granted.”
The golf began immediately with putting. He filled the cups with sand because he couldn’t bend over to pick the ball out of the hole.
“Then it was chipping and pitching. And then we added about 10 yards every day to two days depending on how I felt, how much inflammation was in the area,” he explained. “That’s how it went to the point where I was out there hitting drivers a couple weeks ago, and then started playing golf. I wanted to knock off a little bit of rust on the range before I actually went out there and tried not to embarrass myself on the golf course, and I was able to do that, got some holes in.”
Woods has had a pretty good history at Congressional. He’s had three starts in his tournament, winning in ’ 09 and ’ 12, finishing in a tie for sixth in ’07. He also tied for 19th at the 1997 U.S. Open. He missed the thenAT&T National in 2008 after knee surgery and last year with an elbow issue. He wasn’t going to miss it again.