Tiger Woods tumbles into last place after ugly day at World Challenge

We’ll begin with a caveat against overreacting to a player’s first round in almost four months after a year of injuries. But Tiger Woods’ return on Thursday at his Hero World Challenge was ugly from start to finish.

It began on the first tee, where Tiger pulled a 3-wood and addressed the ball with his new “old” swing under new consultant, Chris Como. After a false start thanks to some disruptive cameramen, Woods promptly yanked his 3-wood left and out of bounds. His provisional also went wild and we were off with a bogey at the first. His next two drives also went left, and suddenly we were already murmuring about those “motor patterns” and making jokes about what had changed under Como.

Of course, Woods’ shaky start off the tee is indicative of nothing right now. He hasn’t played healthy golf in a long time, and there’s going to be that adjustment period as he goes back to what was a more natural and instinctive swing compared to the mechanical approach instilled by Sean Foley.

Those issues off the tee and with his ball-striking were to be expected. There was also going to be some rust with the short game too, but what we saw with his wedges, particularly chipping from tight lies off the green, was quite alarming. Woods chunked at least four chip shots in the most ghastly manners -- two came on back-to-back shots from the same spot at No. 13.

That was certainly the lowlight on what was actually a rebound back nine. He went out with an awful 5-over 41, a good 10 shots worse than Jordan Spieth, who jumped to an early lead at 5-under. But before the round was out, Woods left one short of the putting surface one more time. Thanks to No Laying Up for assembling all four awful chip shots in one place:

Again, those are not different angles of the same shot. It’s surprising to see Woods hit one of those in a week, but those were flubbed out four times in just this round.

Woods definitely hit some good shots with that new swing, so it wasn’t all discouraging. But he is in last place at his own little party, a good four shots worse than the duo in next-to-last, so he’s certainly sticking out right now on the leaderboard in the limited 18-man field event.

I’d expect Tiger to get it back over the next three days. This is at a place, Isleworth, where he lived for more than a decade and played hundreds of rounds. That fact added a bit to how startling it was to see him scuffle so much around the greens, even in his first round in months.

It will get better -- it has to -- but those wedge shots are about as low as we’ve seen Tiger around the green. A changed swing and a new coach aren’t going to fix that. His chances of winning, which weren’t great to begin the week, are almost certainly gone. He’ll spend the next three days just getting reps and trying to shake off some of the “rust,” or whatever it was we watched on Thursday.