Tiger Woods addresses his divorce, health and legacy in the most candid interview of his career

Just two days after a resigned Tiger Woods held one of the more depressing press conferences of his career, Time released an incredible, wide-ranging interview with the 14-time major winner. It’s easily the most revealing interview of Woods’ career (read it, all of it).

Tiger, despite sounding on Tuesday like a guy leaving the 18th green and on the way to the clubhouse, still hopes to make another comeback from another serious back injury and return to competitive golf. In the meantime, as the winner of 79 PGA Tour events that include 14 major titles continues to recover from his third back operation, he has had time to reflect on his career and is amazed at what he has accomplished.

“I’m shocked at how many tournaments I’ve won, in hindsight, now that I’m laid up. More than 100 around the world,” Woods told Time’s Lorne Rubenstein in a rare interview marking the golfer’s impending 40th birthday.

“Playing through it, you really don’t realize it. If you’re in a team sport, you don’t realize how many games you’ve won. It just piles up on you,” Woods, in an elite class with athletes like the Patriots GOAT, observed. “I wouldn’t think that [Tom] Brady right now knows how many games he’s won. You just play, you get ready for the next week, you’re in that moment. You’re always getting ready, always getting ready, always getting ready.

“Well, I can’t get ready for anything,” noted Woods, who is the non-playing host at this week’s Hero World Challenge, a Tour tilt that benefits his foundation. “So it gives you a chance to step back and look at it from a grander scale, from 30,000 feet.”

Woods, who on Tuesday appeared to signal he was on the brink of retirement, stunned many in the golf world with that frank message as well as a candor uncharacteristic of him during his illustrious career. His Time interview was even more astonishing, as Tiger openly answered questions about his very public divorce from Elin Nordegren following his sex scandal, their current “more open and honest” relationship as “best friends,” and his role as co-parent to their two kids.

The superstar earned a reputation over the past 19 years as one of the most guarded players on Tour but he had begun to tear down the wall he had constructed between himself and the public — the media included — in the recent past. A far more relaxed Woods, playlist reverberating in his earbuds, showed up on the Augusta practice range in April after a self-imposed hiatus from golf to solve his chipping woes.

Woods joked back then about his easygoing demeanor.

“Yeah, [I’m] a lot more flexible,” he quipped about whether his attitude had changed in the two months he was on a break.

Despite such apparent changes in his persona, it was still surprising to learn how much Woods has opened up about his personal and professional life.

Woods remembered the moment he knew he was “done” with golf — at least for the foreseeable future, in which there is no timetable for his return. He hit a flop shot on the practice course behind his house and fell to the ground. Without his cell phone and unable to move, Woods was found by his daughter, who called for help.

I was practicing out back at my house. I hit a flop shot over the bunker, and it just hit the nerve. And I was down. I didn’t bring my cell phone. I was out there practicing and I end up on the ground and I couldn’t call anybody and I couldn’t move. Well, thank God my daughter’s a daddy’s girl and she always wants to hang out. She came out and said, “Daddy, what are you doing lying on the ground?” I said, “Sam, thank goodness you’re here. Can you go tell the guys inside to try and get the cart out, to help me back up?” She says, “What’s wrong?” I said, “My back’s not doing very good.” She says, “Again?” I say, “Yes, again, Sam. Can you please go get those guys?”

Unable to do much of anything but walk some 10 minutes on the beach before having to return home and lie down, Woods said on Tuesday he had become quite proficient at video games. Watching golf on TV, though, is not on his must-do list.

“I can’t remember the last time I watched golf. I can’t stand it,” he told Rubenstein. “Unless one of my friends has a chance to win, then I like watching it. I watched Jason [Day] win the PGA. But it was on mute. It’s always on mute and I have some other game on another TV.”

Woods declined to say what he would have done differently before and after his private life exploded onto the pages of the National Enquirer in 2009 but said he wished he and Nordegren had communicated more forthrightly at the time. The one lesson he said he learned from those dark days was that “the most important things in our lives are our kids.

“I wish I would have known that back then,” he added.

As part of his personal rehabilitation, Woods has made sure to let his children know that the reason Mommy and Daddy “don’t live under the same roof … is because Daddy made some mistakes.”

Woods said he would tell the “real story” when the time came but for now the 30,000-foot view would suffice.

“‘Hey, Daddy made some mistakes,’” Woods said he would tell his offspring before they heard the truth from friends or the Internet. “‘But it’s O.K. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. But look what happened at the end of it. Look at how great you are. You have two loving parents that love you no matter what.’”

About what the golf universe (other than ex-coach Hank Haney) has believed since Woods’ “Hello, world” moment, Tiger said it was never the 18 major championships that fueled his will to win. With Woods’ 40th birthday less than a month away (Dec. 30), he said the “major misconception that people have all gotten wrong” is that it has always been about Jack’s firsts, not his 18th.

“It was not the majors, O.K.” he said. “There was one on there. It was the first time he broke 40, the first time he broke 80, the first golf tournament he ever won, first time he ever won the state amateur, first time he won the U.S. Amateur, and the first time he won the U.S. Open. That was it. That was the list.

“It was all age-related,” Woods averred. “To me, that was important. This guy’s the best out there and the best of all time. If I can beat each age that he did it, then I have a chance at being the best.”

Woods surpassed them all, except, as Rubenstein pointed out, Tiger never won the California Amateur Championship.

Adam Scott said during a press conference on Wednesday that kids like Jordan Spieth were too young to know just how dominant a golfer Woods was in his prime.

“I feel so fortunate to have played practice rounds with Tiger at majors in the year 2000, 2001 and really see up close what is the best golf I’ve ever seen, just head and shoulders above the rest,” Scott said. “It’s hard to explain to Jordan coming out now how he was just so much better than everyone at that point. We’re all quick to forget that sometimes.”

According to Tiger, that’s exactly what he wants.

“The greatest thing that could happen is to not be remembered,” Woods told Rubenstein. “What I mean by that is, the kids right now, they don’t know that Michael Jordan played. They see a Jumpman [logo] and they think, that’s so cool … Young kids, really young kids, single digits in age, they have no idea who Michael Jordan was, but the Jumpman logo is cool.

“Now, for me, they don’t understand who that is,” Woods continued. “My learning center, kids go through it and they don’t know who I am. They don’t know what I’ve done. But it’s a safe haven for them to learn and grow.”

Woods faces a long-term rehab before he can even hit a ball again, but he reminisced about teeing it up at his home course, Medalist, with a bunch of guys or “in the evening by myself.

“That’s one of the happiest times I can ever experience. It brings back all the great times I had with my dad, being back there on the old back nine at the Navy golf course [the Seal Navy golf course, in Cypress, Calif., where Woods grew up],” he said. “We’d go back in the corner, on No. 6, way back there in the corner — it’s the furthest point on the golf course — and we’d be on the tee back there just hitting golf balls, not saying a word to each other.

“Going out in the evenings brings me back to that happy place,” said Woods. “I would have to say that, probably, my only peace has been in between the ropes and hitting the shots.”

Woods touched on several more subjects, including being “reconciled” to the possibility of his career being over, playing through past injuries against his doctors’ advice, his relationship with Lindsey Vonn, his short-game problems that started at last year’s Hero World Challenge and on having “peaked at 11.” There’s so much in what is absolutely the most fascinating one-on-one interview of his career. Go read it.