Tiger Woods blames a ‘deactivated’ butt for his latest injury

Tiger Woods withdrew from yet another tournament on Thursday with what appeared to be yet another back injury. The issue looked serious, with Woods grimacing after every shot, hobbling up the fairway, and struggling to bend over and get his ball out of the hole. So what was the issue? “Deactivated glutes,” according to the 14-time major winner.

“It’s just my glutes are shutting off,” Woods told a makeshift media scrum in the parking lot as he packed up early at Torrey Pines. The first round was delayed more than two hours due to fog in the area, and after a couple false starts, Woods said, in essence, his butt got stiff. “Then they don’t activate and then, hence, it goes into my lower back. So, I tried to activate my glutes as best I could, in between, but they never stayed activated.”

Woods said he first started to feel it on the putting green while the players waited around for an official restart of the Farmers Insurance Open. But he could never get it “activated” and that caused what looked like the same old lower back issues throughout another sad, painful round.

“Glute activation” is an entirely new, but not unexpected, term in the Tiger jargon. As you can imagine, the golf press took the term and ran with it on Twitter, making many bad jokes and a few good ones.