Tiger Woods’ comeback lasted just 3 rounds before he got hurt again. Now what?

Tiger Woods may have another competitive decade in him but it’s hard to be optimistic just a week into what has been a discouraging, and at times alarming, comeback. After a week of three underwhelming rounds of varying ugliness, Tiger withdrew from the Omega Dubai Desert Classic on Friday with what his agent Mark Steinberg called back spasms. Tiger, via Steinberg, is downplaying it as an isolated spasm that flared up and unrelated to the very serious nerve pain he’s experienced over the last few years.

Tiger’s first week back playing on the worldwide tours could have gone worse, but not much worse. In the past seven days, Tiger posted rounds of 76 and 72 to miss the cut at Torrey Pines, carded his worst ever number in 29 career rounds in Dubai, and withdrew in his second start with back troubles. Before he made his first start, Tiger said he knew he was testing himself with a busy early season schedule but that his body was ready for it.

“It is a concern, no doubt about it,” Tiger said last week of putting his health to the test right away with a rigorous schedule. “But I’m also looking forward to it. I sat out long enough. My body is in a pretty good state where I feel I can handle the workload. But I still have to go out and do it.”

That lasted only three rounds.

We tried to recalibrate expectations and the bar wasn’t exactly high after Tiger’s 17-month absence from the tour. But this got dark pretty quick and rapidly devolved back into questions about what, if anything, is left of one of the two greatest golf careers of all time.

More disconcerting than Tiger’s actual score of 77 on Thursday in Dubai was the way he looked. Not how the shots looked or the failure to make a single birdie in easy scoring conditions. But how Tiger looked -- the movements in between shots, the sighs, the disconsolate face, the slumped shoulders.

We were ready to accept another missed cut as part of a slow process of getting back on the most competitive tours in the world at 41 years old. Expectations were adjusted and patience was required, which can be a hard thing when a camera shows your every single shot in your attempt to getting back to competitiveness.

Something seemed off, however, before he even teed it up on Thursday. He looked stiff on the putting green and walked awkwardly to the first tee. A wince on his first drive, which we optimistically hoped was a squint into the sun as a badly duck-hooked ball sailed off the fairway, started setting off alarm bells on Twitter as the American audience tuned in from afar.

To put it bluntly, he then looked like an elderly grandpa trying to climb out of a greenside bunker on the very first hole.

Everyone watching and following on Twitter saw it. The Euro Tour broadcast saw it (“I don’t think his back’s right, he’s very tentative walking”). It was troubling on the very first hole thanks to recent years of “Tiger Woods Withdrawal Watch” conditioning and warning signs. Even after being conditioned that way, to see it so soon after a 17-month absence that exercised extreme caution left us incredulous. Despite what seemed like easily observable discomfort, Tiger said after the round that he was in no pain at all. But he would never make it back on the Emirates course.

Tiger’s agent maintained on Friday that the back spasms that forced Woods WD did not flare up until late Thursday night. We’ll accept that timeline, but that doesn’t change how he looked in that opening round. Maybe the spasms weren’t there and his back felt fine but he still looked like an aging pro just trying to not get hurt. Earlier this week at a press conference, Tiger said his one major swing philosophy these days is simply to “play away from pain.” That looked like a struggle in his first and only round in Dubai.

This brings us to another question that bubbled below the surface at the start of the week but boils now: why the hell was Tiger even playing this event? After a 17-month layoff that was, by his own admission, extremely cautious and deliberate, why fly around the world to play an event you don’t really need on your schedule? If you want reps in this pre-Masters first quarter of the season, the Phoenix Open was right down the road after missing the cut in San Diego last week. If you wanted to avoid the frat party circus atmosphere of the Phoenix Open, then play the Bob Hope earlier in the month and pile up birdies at that relatively benign and enjoyable setup.

Even if he was totally healthy and has a successful history here, it didn’t make sense to fly this distance and squeeze in this Dubai event, which he added as the final piece to a four-tourney-in-five-week stretch. We’re aware he was paid a nice seven-figure appearance fee to show up -- a practice that’s forbidden on the stateside tour but a tradition of Tiger’s (and other USA stars) patronage of these international events. But does he really need that money? Does that matter at this point? Maybe it does.

This may sound like unfair hindsight criticism but the question was there before he withdrew. It just seemed unnecessary to sprint to Dubai from San Diego and then back to the west coast where he’s hosting at Riviera. That would have been the same question had he played a fully healthy 36 or 72 holes. What we got instead was a Tiger who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world from the very first hole on Thursday, slogged his way to an ugly 77 and then withdrew with an injury just a day later.

Those moments of brilliance we saw in that unofficial event in the Bahamas seem like so long ago. We were genuinely encouraged by his performance at the Hero World Challenge in early December, when his putting and ball striking looked fantastic and he led the field in birdies. That fleeting week of jubilation, orgasmic tweets, and excitement about Tiger’s game seems like it was from a different era, not two months ago.

Now we’re back to more of the same depressing cycle. These three rounds he played in the last week could have been plucked out of any of those tournaments from 2014 or 2015, when it was almost always ugly and never really fun to watch. It was like nothing had really changed during the 17-month layoff. It was back to being a grind, not a particularly happy one, mixed in with some health troubles.

Steinberg insisted on Friday that this is simply an isolated back spasm and not the kind of nerve pain that forced Tiger into multiple surgeries and months away from the game. The hope was that he’ll still be able to play in Los Angeles in less than two weeks. That event, the Genesis Open at Riviera, now benefits his foundation so he’d likely be there as the host one way or another. He has also committed to play the Honda Classic the following week at the start the Florida swing, the portion of the schedule when pre-Masters prep really peaks.

The optimistic view after such a discouraging week is that this is just a back spasm that came at a bad time on the other side of the world. He’ll be back at Riviera and hit the ground running again to get ready for the Masters. Given everything he went through during his strenuous rehab and how long it took to get back, this was almost certainly the final comeback of Tiger’s career. If this is more than some spasm, well ... we’ll leave the obvious unsaid right now and hope to see him in Los Angeles.