Bob Costas once said “If you knew nothing about golf, and if you’d landed here from the planet Pluto, and they sat you down at Augusta, your eyes would go to him,” referencing Tiger Woods. “You’d say ‘Who’s that guy? That’s the guy I wanna watch.’ You’d just be drawn to him.” Leave it to one of the greatest broadcasters of all time to perfectly sum up my lifelong fascination with the greatest golfer that many of us have ever seen.
When I was so young that I didn’t know a driver from a putter, my introduction to sports was sitting next to my dad, taking in whatever he happened to be watching. And when my dad watched golf, my eyes were drawn to that skinny kid who hit it a mile and pumped his fist with the kind of unadulterated joy that coursed through every living room watching him. I started to watch golf because I wanted to watch Tiger Woods. Plain and Simple.
There are four Tournaments of Tiger Woods’ that I remember from that time. The first was the 2005 Masters, where Tiger won his 4th Green Jacket. In route to winning, he hit a seemingly impossible chip from off the 16th green that rolled down the slope, stopped for a moment on the lip of the hole, and then tumbled in. This is where I first experienced the magic of Tiger Woods’ creativity, playing a shot that most wouldn’t be able to imagine and creating the kind of theater that could captivate an audience.
The second tournament I remember was the 2006 Open Championship, where an emotional Tiger won his first major since his father Earl passed away. Earl introduced Tiger to the game, and Tiger always called Earl his best friend. After a stoic four days ended with a tap-in on the 72nd green, he celebrated the win by sharing incredibly tearful, emotional embraces with then-caddie Steve Williams and then-wife Elin Nordegren. This win seemed to humanize Tiger Woods, for a moment removing his robotic focus and trademark precision, and allowed us to see him in a way we never had before.
The Third tournament I remember was the 2008 US Open, where Tiger won the tournament after an 18-hole playoff (and one hole of sudden-death) against journeyman Rocco Mediate. He had played the event just a couple months after knee surgery, and it was revealed afterwards that Tiger had played with a torn ACL and stress fractures in his leg, and somehow went 91 holes against the best in the game and prevailed against the toughest test in golf. This win demonstrated the determination, focus, and innate ability that Tiger Woods had to accomplish anything, even in the face of the doubts of others.
Through the course of these and many other wins, Tiger Woods was one of the most beloved and marketable athletes the world has ever seen. He, at one point, held all 4 of the Men’s Major Golf Championships, won the Masters and US Open by margins of 12 and 15 strokes respectively, and held the world No. 1 ranking for a record 683 weeks (the next closest is 331). Needless to say, he was on top of his world. As life seems to always present, though, there is always a flip side to the coin.
The fourth event I remember was what, until recently, many viewed as the beginning of the end of Tiger’s career: the 2009 PGA Championship, played at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minnesota. With the tournament held in my home state, I got the opportunity to attend it and see Tiger live for the first time. After three rounds, he was two strokes clear of the field. In 14 previous attempts to close a major with a 54-hole lead, Tiger was undefeated. But on this day, relative unknown Y.E. Yang chased him down to score one of the biggest upsets in golfing history. What’s more, Tiger had a chance to tie on the 17th hole, but missed a crucial par putt with me sitting in the front row watching.
What followed for Tiger Woods was nearly a decade of scandal, drama, and injury that led most to believe he would never win a meaningful event again. In November of that same year, a car accident on Thanksgiving night led to one of the most infamous infidelity scandals in the modern media age. Tiger Woods lost his marriage, many of his sponsors, his swing coach, his caddie, and his game in the following 2 years. And on top of that, the once beloved athlete lost many of his fans, became the butt of jokes on late night television, and was relegated to the status of a social pariah. One can reasonably debate whether we should care about the personal lives of professional athletes. Personally, short of criminal behavior, I have always held that it is none of our business what one does behind closed doors, but that’s for each individual watching to decide for themselves. What can’t be denied is that everything that happened in the aftermath of the scandal prevented him from winning on the PGA Tour in 2010 and 2011, after having won at least once in each of the previous 14 seasons.
Tiger found some of his game in 2012 and 2013, winning 8 events and even regaining the World No. 1 spot. However, at the end of 2013, a nagging back injury started to get worse, and over the course of the next 4 years, he would undergo four back surgeries, take multiple prolonged spells away from the course, and play some of his worst golf when he did attempt to tee it up. This led most observers of the game to doubt whether he would ever be a meaningful player again. Many even flatly stated that Tiger Woods was done playing professional golf. His magical touch seemed lost forever, the humanity we thought we saw in him was presumed to be a lie, and no amount of determination seemed to rescue him from the injuries he had sustained.
Interestingly enough, it was during this period of time that I became an enormous golf geek. While I had a certain appreciation for the game when Tiger was at his best, I didn’t fall in love with the game until my Teenage and College years, when Tiger was barely relevant as a player. I would research different varieties of clubs and try to understand the physics of different types of shots. I would learn the intricacies of different kinds of courses and come to appreciate different styles of play, all the while becoming an avid, if not particularly good, golfer myself. It was during this time that I started pining for the return of Tiger Woods. Highlights weren’t going to do. I needed to experience the genius of this guy in real time again. While I also had doubts about if he would ever come back, I held out hope through the worst of the worst.
And then, things started changing. After 3 failed microdiscectomy procedures, Tiger underwent a spinal fusion in the Spring of 2017. Though many initially viewed this procedure as a death knell, it finally relieved him of pain he had been enduring over the previous years. Tiger, who at times could not even walk without pain, now had the ability to swing a golf club pain free. Month by month, Tiger would release videos of himself chipping, swinging irons, and then eventually hitting drivers. Even his famous low stinger shot made an appearance in one of the videos. Speculation began rising that Tiger was going to make yet another comeback. Tiger Woods finally returned to competitive golf in late 2017. Over the next year, he proved that this time he was actually healthy, ultimately winning the TOUR Championship and making runs at titles the Open and PGA Championship. A once sordid prognosis for his future ceded way for excitement from both casual and hardcore golf fans.
But there was still one mountain to climb. Since the 2008 US Open, when Tiger beat the game’s best on a broken leg, he hadn’t won another major. For many, Tiger Woods playing, contending, even winning a regular event wasn’t going to be enough. To be back, he needed to win a Major again. Enter Augusta National Golf Club, and the 2019 Masters Tournament.
Heading into this year’s Masters, Tiger had yet to win an event on the season. His best finish was a quarterfinal defeat at the Match Play event, and short putting woes had led to concerns that he wasn’t ready for Augusta’s notoriously undulating green complexes. And in the first two days, those concerns seemed valid. Tiger was among the worst in the tournament in putting inside 10 feet, yet somehow, he was only one back of the leaders. That might have been attributed to the fact he was ranked first in the field in greens in regulation and putts outside 10 feet (weird, to be certain). He was doing what he had always done in his best years, making up for a shortcoming in one part of his game by playing lights out in another. Through two days, he had posted rounds of 70 and 68.
Then the Weekend came, and we got vintage Tiger. On Saturday, he fired a scintillating 5-under 67, pulling within 2 of the lead and securing a place in the final group on Sunday. The short putting woes that plagued him all season suddenly disappeared, and he had a chance to win in the final round. On Sunday, he gave us a different taste of his vintage. While everyone around him faltered and made mistakes, Tiger Woods stayed steady, posting a final round 70 to claim his fifth Green Jacket and 15th major championship. He stared down many of the game’s best players, including Francesco Molinari and Brooks Koepka, the winners of the previous 3 majors, and emerged victorious. For fans who had hoped for a comeback through all the years of scandal and injury, you couldn’t write a better script. Jim Nantz called the moment “The Return to Glory.” Another legendary broadcaster summing up an iconic moment perfectly.
But it went beyond that. On Sunday, Tiger showed us some of the qualities that made us fascinated by him in the first place. On the 16th hole, the sight of his famous chip 14 years ago, Tiger played a brilliant 8-iron that nearly went in for an Ace. The magic was back.
On the 18th hole, after tapping in to secure victory, Tiger flipped a switch from stoic to emotional, sharing embraces with Caddie Joe LaCava, girlfriend Erica Herman, his mother Kultida, and his kids, Sam and Charlie. The humanity was back.
And, after all the injuries, after all the doubts, he was back holding the title that most said he would never hold again: Major Champion. At 43 years old, Tiger Woods had accomplished what perhaps only he thought was possible. The determination was back.
Tiger Woods won the Masters last Sunday. Those words are still hard to believe. How he got from a point of being indestructible to being a laughing stock to then rising to the top again is a book that would have been hard to write before it happened in front of our eyes. As a person who’s followed this story since I was a kid, Sunday was about as fun as it has ever been. But here’s the amazing part: Tiger Woods isn’t done yet. We don’t know how much longer he can play at this level, but after all that has happened in his life, he’s finally healthy consistently again. And, he’s probably already planning for the next Major he will play. Whilst we all continue to marvel at how great he is at his craft, he seems to have regained the focus that made his craft so great. In a few weeks, Tiger will head to the Black Course at Bethpage State Park for the PGA Championship, the site of his 2002 US Open win. Perhaps, at that public course in Long Island, the next chapter in Tiger Wood’s story will begin to be written.
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