TIGER FINDS THE GROOVE
Even trademark fist pump was back in round of 65
His greatness becomes a more distant memory by the day. But even if Tiger Woods is more than three years removed from his most recent victory, the enormity of his accomplishments continues to astound.
Seventy-nine PGA Tour wins. Fourteen major championships. And at least seven surgical procedures to repair the litany of hurt his once-violent swing incurred on various bits of crucial human tissue.
Given the uncertainty surrounding his health, then, Woods’s participation in the ongoing Hero World Challenge, which continues until Sunday in the Bahamas, ranks as one of the most anticipated events on the golf calendar.
A year ago, after all, when Woods was convalescing in Florida after undergoing no fewer than three back surgeries relating to a pinched nerve in the span of about 19 months, it was easy enough to get the idea that the laser-focused, hyper-competitive Woods who’d annihilated fields as a younger man was no longer of this earth. In a rare sweeping interview with GTA-based golf journalist Lorne Rubenstein published a year ago this week, Woods said a lot that suggested he was no longer single-mindedly driven to be a peerless athlete. He sounded as amazed by his golfing life as the rest of us. (“I’ve done a lot more in the game than I ever thought I could,” he said.) He clarified that, contrary to popular lore, he was never actually obsessed with breaking Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors — that he was, as a younger man, solely focused on reaching milestones at an earlier age than the Golden Bear achieved them. “I beat them all,” he said. Above all, he sounded remarkably human. He told Rubenstein that being a good father to his two children meant more to him than any golf tournament. And he spoke of the pain that comes with being an aging great, of being so stooped in agony from back trouble that even practising putting had sometimes become unbearable.
All of it made Woods a more relatable character. None of it answered the central question of his current situation: Will the current world No. 898 ever again win a golf tournament of significance?
The opening two rounds in the Bahamas certainly couldn’t answer that question. But Friday’s bogeyfree 65, which amounted to an eight-shot improvement over Woods’s adventure-filled opening 18, offered some promising signs that a return to respectability might not be as far-fetched as it seemed even a year ago.
Woods’s round, mind you, left him at six under par for the tournament — six shots off the overnight lead held jointly by world No. 3 Dustin Johnson and world No. 6 Hideki Matsuyama. And the Hero World Challenge, to be clear, isn’t the cauldron of a major championship, or even the pressure test of a regular PGA Tour event. It’s listed as an “unofficial” stop on the tour. It’s hosted by Woods and acts as a showcase for the Tiger Woods Foundation. And it’s tiny. When Justin Rose withdrew after Thursday’s first round, it left the field at 17 players. This is basically Woods and a bunch of fellow one-percenters splitting $3.5 million in prize money and enjoying the tiki bar.
Still, Woods’s performance so far has been filled with positives an optimist could easily frame as the bedrock of an impending renaissance.
Woods, for one, appeared healthy, displaying nary a televised wince through the opening 36 holes.
His newly revamped swing looked, as his former coach Hank Haney said on Sirius XM radio, “less violent.” Haney said via Twitter that he saw enough in Woods’s one-overpar opening round to predict he would win “at least one more major” — although he followed up to reserve the right to qualify that forecast should Woods’s struggle with the so-called chip yips reemerge.
Those short-game yips, which saw Woods flubbing seemingly easy wedges when last he regularly competed, haven’t been in evidence so far. And if he’s unburdened of that mental hiccup, Woods also looked lighter in the upper body than he did during his muscle-bound peak — a positive to critics who have suggested his weight-room-induced top-heaviness created unnecessary strain on his joints.
Whether any of that will translate to the grind of more arduous com- petition is anyone’s guess. What’s without doubt is that the golf world is shamelessly rooting for him to succeed. For all the talk about how the game is in good hands with the likes of No. 1 Jason Day and No. 2 Rory McIlroy ruling leaderboards, Woods remains a next-level draw.
Even in the summer of 2015 — the worst summer of his career — Woods’s presence turned telecasts into ratings hits. When Woods came into the final round of the unheralded Wyndham Championship two shots off the lead, the Sunday broadcast drew golf’s best non-major TV ratings since he won The Players Championship in 2013. The Saturday broadcast of that tournament did better numbers than Saturdays at that year’s U.S. Open and British Open. In other words, fans preferred watching Tiger try and win a second-tier tour event to watching Jordan Spieth take a run at golf’s Grand Slam.
No surprise, then, that the ratings for the first round of the Hero World Challenge were the highest in the 18-year history of the event. Woods will never be as dominant as he was in his prime. But he’s maybe never been more interesting than he is now, attempting to climb back to competitive relevance after a stunning decline.
After Thursday’s trouble-filled, bogey-marred round, Friday’s better effort suggested Woods still recalled how to summon his confidence. After he made a par-saving putt on No. 8, he told reporters that he told his caddie, Joe LaCava: “I’m not dropping a shot today.” And when he made good on that vow with a long par-saving putt on No. 16, he even unleashed a trademark fist pump.
If that grand gesture wasn’t delivered with the oomph of the ones that accompanied some of his greatest moments as a champion — well, this was the Bahamas in December. As for what we’ll see in Augusta in April? Contender or not, the early returns on Woods’s latest comeback suggest it’ll be worth watching.