Working just from memory, this must be at least the fourth edition of Tiger Woods, the consistent theme being that in each he has been terrific. The young Tiger, the revamped Tiger, the Tiger Slam Tiger, the married Tiger, the post funeral Tiger, the new father Tiger, the limping Tiger. So many Tigers.
A pride of Tigers, or is that lions? Well, there have always been enough to go around.
All these Tigers ought to come with Roman numerals the way Super Bowls do, so that it may not be exactly clear which is which and which is when but the pretension assures significance. In fact, we should catalog his major victories the same way, so that Jack Nicklaus’ 18 would be just everyday.
Once Woods gets to his final total, say XXIV or something, we would know how much more it weighs.
This one—let’s call it Tiger IV—is certainly the most unsure of them all, even if Woods himself proved that golf can be played on one leg.
Still, that guilty left knee has been repaired four times now and this last one sounds like something earned on a football field, not on a mown fairway. Torn ACL. Those two words are as scary as any to an athlete. Double stress facture. A single would have been enough.
To have had all that and still have played 91 holes at Torrey Pines at last summer’s U.S. Open begs both admiration and dismay. Nothing Woods does ever again will surpass that. How odd to know at 33, with presumably more greatness still ahead, no greater reward awaits.
One must assume, then, having set so high a mark, that Woods is ready to resume what he left, that he is not just bored or misguided or anything less than what he always was.
The risk is not ours but his, and it is easy to imagine impatience disturbing him long before it does us. And if even if Woods is less, or is just rusty, any inspection is secondary to appreciation for his being back.
The return of a single athlete to his sport has never been as pregnant as this one, not Ben Hogan coming back from his car accident, not John McEnroe returning from adulthood nor Joe DiMaggo back from the war, not Muhammad Ali from political exile.
I do not remember any of them receiving, to quote the PGA tour site, “comprehensive on-line hole-by-hole video, audio, scoring and editorial coverage.” Douglas McArthur didn’t get that on his return to the Philippines.
The time that Woods has been gone has its own identity, the Tour Without Tiger, even though it was only eight months and that every tournament won by anyone else still counts.
When Phil Mickelson won at Riviera last week, coinciding with Woods’ announcement of his return, the significance of Mickelson’s victory was widely portrayed as the last one without Woods.
Look at it this way. You’re doing well at a singles mixer, and then suddenly George Clooney shows up.
It is possible to believe that somehow Woods is just what we all need, a symbol of resilience, an envoy of expectations, a courier of hope. Well, sure, that would be nice, and nicer if your 401K cared.
How helpful it would be to the general economy if there were a Woods to ride to the rescue, ( and while he is at it maybe salvage a discarded newspaper). So it was thought that Barak Obama was such a one and so it has turned out not to be so.
But all Woods has to do is restore golf to its place on the sports shelf, where it has been lately missing. Never a game of the masses in any case, golf faints easily from small concerns. While golf has continued after a Palmer or a Nicklaus, and so it will after Woods, it has done so quietly enough to hear a tee drop.
Strangely, Woods plays so few actual tournaments that his absence affects a small number of real locations. Yet does his shadow fall so far and linger so late that places he ignores leave a light in the window (not counting our late, lamented gathering at Castle Pines.)
Not in just these times but at any time, it is not easy to adopt as your proxy anyone who is playing a game for $8 million of someone else’s money.
That’s kind of how we got to where we are.