Add Tiger Ti Woods W d to list li of ff favorites i f for Masters in two weeks following his 5-stroke victory at Arnold Palmer Invitational Sunday.

Ends victory drought

his wasn’t a major, though there is one of those coming up in two weeks at the place it all really began a long time ago for Tiger Woods, now that somehow it is 15 years since he won that first Masters the way he did. But this was a huge crucible for Woods, even if it was Arnold Palmer’s tournament, where he had already won six times before. We needed to see if his driver and his putter could stand up in the heat on Sunday again, in a full-field tournament on the PGA Tour, for the first time since September of 2009. And if he could finally get back up.

And he did Sunday at Bay Hill. For this one Sunday and this one weekend, at the age of 36, after one of the most stunning falls from grace in the history of American sports, he reminded us of the way he used to do it.

For this one day Tiger Woods beat his playing partner, a tough little former U.S. Open champ named Graeme Mcdowell, the way he used to beat a lot of guys.

When he had to put the ball in the fairway, he did. When he had to hit some long-iron shot over water and stick it close to the pin and make sure Mcdowell wasn’t going to make a serious move at him, he did. When he had to get up and down and make a 12-footer for par on the back nine, he did that.

“A big moment in golf,” Johnny Miller said when Woods was marking his ball on the 18th green, after Woods had smiled and high-fived his way up the last fairway at Arnold Palmer’s golf tournament.

Palmer is still known as The King, because he did more than anybody, and that includes Jack Nicklaus, to make professional golf a television sport in this country, and to make it a big deal on television about the time pro football was becoming the same thing. But starting with that Masters in 1997, when Woods won by 12 shots, Tiger Woods was the king of golf, on television and on the most famous courses in the world.

And Woods stayed king, really, until Thanksgiving night 2009, when a weird, crazy drive down his own driveway, not so far from where he won this tournament Sunday, was like an outof-control ride from the top of the mountain to the bottom.

Then came all the women in his life, this amazing conga line. And even though there had been other celebrities who had gotten caught cheating on their wives, sports celebrities and political celebrities, somehow what people found out about Tiger Woods made them mad. Somehow he was the one, out of all of them, who made his fans, enough of them anyway, feel as if they had been betrayed.

You know what has happened since, the flashes he showed you at some majors, including the Masters. And the continuing problems with his surgical knee. And the way he fell apart playing with Phil Mickelson in the final round of the AT&T at Pebble Beach, where once Woods had won an Open by what felt like 50 shots.

There was the way he walked away from a tournament a couple of weeks ago with a sore Achilles. Over nearly 1,000 days, the only tournament of any kind he had won in the United States since September of 2009 was at a glorified invitational — 18 golfers — called the Chevron World Challenge last year.

Now he wins again. Doesn’t mean he catches Jack or wins the Masters or gets back to No. 1 in the world or scares the rest of the field the way he used