Is Tiger Woods motivated enough to win a major championship?

Tiger Woods is not the only member of his camp who remains optimistic about the progress of his latest swing change and what the future holds for the struggling former world No. 1. Woods’ confidante Notah Begay believes his former Stanford teammate will not only win again on the PGA Tour, but that the 195th-ranked golfer will eventually add a 15th major title to his resume.

Begay, not exactly an unbiased bystander when it comes to Woods, shared his prognostication during a pre-U.S. Open teleconference on Wednesday but there was a rather significant caveat in his rosy forecast: Tiger, at 39 in human years, must stay healthy.

“He has a different body, he’s got a different mind, he’s got a lot more scar tissue [than he did in his 2000-2008 heyday], but I’m fairly certain he will win again, and I’m fairly certain he will win another major,” said Begay. “He can’t afford any more surgeries or physical setbacks that keep him out for more than three months, because there’s just -- every setback like sets you back in dog years. For every month, it’s seven months almost in terms of recapturing your game and getting the timing back and all of those other things.”

The most recent health woe in a career plagued with them has involved Woods’ back, which forced him to undergo surgery last year, miss most of the 2014 season and struggle mightily when he did compete. This year, despite an early withdrawal at Torrey Pines that Tiger blamed on his balky back, he has been generally in fine condition, physically.

The state of Woods’ game and whether he still has the emotional fire needed to contend at the highest level, remain mysteries. In a season full of official “career worsts” that started with an 82 at the Phoenix Open and culminated (so far) in an 85 and a last-place finish at Muirfield Village, Woods keeps on keeping on, though he described himself as “mentally beat up” during the Memorial.

How much longer the guy who became accustomed to winning at a ferocious clip can continue to overhaul his swing and scuffle along at the bottom of the leaderboard is anyone’s guess, including Begay’s.

“The other big factor that I think is a challenge here is motivation,” said the Golf Channel analyst about Woods, who has won 14 majors and 79 PGA Tour titles. “He beat everybody, everywhere around the world and it’s tough to find the motivation to just get up and go out and do it again.”

Begay’s Golf Channel colleague, Frank Nobilo, noted that Woods had “already done everything that has to be done in golf” with a few different swings, but that it might be time for some inner reflection.

“He’s been critiqued like, ‘oh, you can’t do this in your swing, you can’t do that,’ but he’s won major championships with those same supposed flaws in there. So I think, psychologically, that’s what’s hard to fix is, he’s trying to implement things that a 39-year old needs to do, especially with his injuries,” Nobilo said. “If Tiger Woods wants to keep playing golf, which it looks like he does, whether he gets help to do it or whatever, he has to somehow get through that and see the light on the other side. But it’s tough.”

There’s also the matter of every shot Woods hits -- good and bad -- still demanding unprecedented attention from the huge galleries that follow him and the TV cameras that beam every flaw into your living room.

“He’s got to do that [perform] in front of everybody, so he’s got to fail miserably like he did on Saturday [at the Memorial], and in an effort to sort of recapture certain elements or refine certain aspects of the swing that both he and [swing consultant] Chris [Como] have identified as sort of part of the progression that they’re looking for,” said Begay.

“What you’re seeing in his post-round remarks, he’s not up there feeling sorry for himself, he’s not up there pointing fingers,” Begay added. “He’s just saying, ‘Look, this is part of the progression,’ and he knows that his bad golf is going to get magnified, and there’s going to be a tremendous amount of criticism around him. But I don’t think he would go out there with the type of game that he had with the understanding that he was going to fly under the radar.”

As always, all eyes will be fixed firmly on Woods at the U.S. Open, where the “fear factor” could be an issue for a player who has had real difficulty transferring good practice sessions on the range to the playing field.

“With the last three or four teachers he’s worked with, if you watch Tiger warm up, he really hits the ball great on the driving range, so there’s something going on in his head,” Bob Rotella, a noted mental coach who works with several tour players, told SB Nation in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“Call it whatever you want to call it -- you can call it performance anxiety, you can call it doubt, you can call it fear, you can talk worried about where he’s going to miss it, but he doesn’t have clarity,” said Rotella, who, via an American Express initiative, will help U.S. Open fans on-site and digitally sharpen their mental approaches to golf. “I’ve watched him, it’s really good when he’s warming up. He’s going to have to get his head clear on the golf course.”

Generous fairways at Chambers Bay should benefit Woods, who has had a serious two-way miss going off the tees.

“This ought to be the easiest week on tour to be able to stand up over a driver and trust it, because there’s going to be a lot of room,” said Rotella. “This course sets up for him very nicely. I think we’ll find out a lot about where he’s at after this week is over. That would be a huge surprise to me if he really struggles this week.”

Gio Valiante, who helped Justin Rose gain a psychological edge on his way to the 2013 U.S. Open title, also predicted a meaningful week for Woods. Valiante, though, foresaw a terrible outcome for the three-time winner of the national championship on a course he believed did not fit Tiger’s eye at all.

“U.S. Open, you can’t hide. You can … mask your weaknesses at Augusta National [where Woods finished T17 in April], because the fairways are very generous. There’s nowhere to hide at a U.S. Open,” Valiante told us by phone. “This is shaping up to be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

“This is the perfect storm -- a golf course that is designed to truly punish bad driving, a golfer with driver anxiety who’s the most scrutinized golfer. This could be cataclysmically bad, like career-endingly bad,” said Valiante. “His wires are so crossed mentally [between swings] … this truly could be disastrous and career-ending, yes. There’s no worse place for him to be showing up right now.”

Valiante went so far as to envision a “small possibility” that Woods would not play this week if his practice sessions did not go well.

Begay was unconcerned about such matters, especially since witnessing Woods overcome what many believed were career-threatening chipping yips.

“After he withdrew from the Farmers [Insurance Open], we all got a chance to see how just unbelievably bad his short game was, and I had some concerns because I’d never seen anybody overcome either mental or technical deficiencies that he was exhibiting in those rounds,” Begay said. “Within two weeks of that, he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘I can fix this.’ I was like, ‘well, I don’t believe you.’

All facets of Woods’ game were misfiring at the Memorial.

But before the debacle at Jack Nicklaus’ tourney, Tiger returned from a two-month furlough with his short game back on-track and a successful outing at the Masters. That impressed Begay.

“He did that and it led me to believe that there’s a certain amount of genius in what Tiger Woods possesses as a player, that none of us, no matter how much we know about the game, how much we’ve been around the game or how much personal experience we’ve had firsthand with the game will ever understand,” said Begay.

“I’ve always tried to -- when I saw what he did at Augusta -- just tried to have a measure of respect when it comes to some of these technical changes that he feels he needs to make to progress,” added Begay. “I do think players can reinvent themselves. They have to, because it’s a way to maintain a certain type of motivational focus that is required to play the game at its highest level.”

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