Woods must show the gumption

But recovery gets more unlikely with each failure

For Tiger Woods the end cannot come soon enough. Not the end of his career — although some might think that — but the end of the season, the worst “healthy” campaign of his professional life, the season when he dropped outside the world’s top 250, below a player called Hudson Swafford.

There is a little way to fall yet. If and when he finishes outside the top 40 at the Quickens Loan National this week — a tournament in aid of his charitable foundation — he will arrive at the PGA Championship outside the top 300, having not even qualified for next week’s WGC Bridgestone Invitational, an event he has won eight times. The ignominy will be complete and many will inevitably draw a big, fat line under his legend.

They should not be too hasty. No, Woods will never dominate as he once did and the reasons for that are multilayered. Not only is he older, but the kids are bolder and, following his supreme example, have cranked up the standard several notches. But to say he will never win again, will never contend in the majors again, remains ridiculously premature.

Woods is only 39, the same age as Zach Johnson, the winner of the Open. And Woods need not go as far back as the great Ben Hogan — who won three majors in his 40s — for inspiration. After passing this supposedly grim watershed, Vijay Singh won 25 times, including a major; Phil Mickelson has won five times, including a major, Ernie Els six times, including a major. These are Woods’s contemporaries, to whom he has always proved himself superior.

Now that he is fit again, it is simple. If Woods wants it and does it properly, there is at least one more chapter in this most captivating of sporting stories. Those are two very big ifs, however, and they get magnified which each and every passing failure.

I was one of those who would roll my eyes and shake my head when anyone questioned his commitment. But recently that faith has wavered. Watching him at St. Andrews was disturbing — not so much for the hackerisms, the shots from a 10 handicapper’s worst nightmare — but for the absence of grind, for the acceptance of mediocrity, for his inability to launch anything resembling a fight. Instead he laughed and joked his way up the fairways with Jason Day’s caddie, a scenario which Day himself found resonant.

“He used to have that killer instinct,” Day said, reflecting on the hero of his youth. Didn’t he just? Woods was never a robot who worked only when all the cogs were whirring. He could and would turn it around by the strength of his competitive psyche alone, overcoming the wildest driving, glaring technical deficiencies, a broken leg even, to get himself into position. Not anymore.

Woods tells us he is close and, who knows, this might be the week and August might be the month when he catches lightning in that bottle. But by any rational analysis he is not close; he has never been further away.