Tiger Woods is back, but Torrey Pines might not be the place for a welcome return

There’s a TV promo running for this week’s Farmers Insurance Open, and in between the monotone ads for reverse mortgages and investment advisers, a stentorian voice bellows out, “You know some things just go together, like Tiger plus Torrey.”

That might be a suitable line to run in a career retrospective. There is no doubt Tiger Woods has owned Torrey Pines in a way other pros can only dream about, winning eight times on the course, including seven at this PGA Tour event and one U.S. Open. But that promo line is not a suitable hook for this week. It’s not reflective of Woods coming to Torrey Pines in the year of our lord 2018. Torrey Pines has been a house of horrors for Woods in recent years, and it’s not exactly the easiest spot for a player who has been n/a the last four years to jump right into the most competitive Tour in the world.

The truth is we don’t know if Tiger + Torrey go together anymore. An honest expectation for this week should be rooted in Woods’ recent troubles at Torrey Pines and the course’s unwelcoming setup. The excitement of having him back should be countered with an unease and skepticism because this is Torrey Pines.

No one place, one course, encapsulates the arc of Woods’ career better than Torrey Pines. This place has witnessed Tiger’s psychotic competitiveness and arguably the greatest moment of his career, winning the U.S. Open, the “toughest test in golf,” over five days and 91 holes on a torn ACL. It witnessed the launch point of a lithe Woods “figuring it out” in 1999 with Butch Harmon to go on a run of the greatest golf ever played. It witnessed a lengthy stretch of historic dominance of the world’s top tour with back-to-back-to-back-to-back wins. It witnessed a post-scandal Woods pull it together with Sean Foley to start another Player of the Year run.

But it’s also witnessed Woods’ “deactivated glutes,” chipping yips, completely unpredictable driving, missed cuts, withdrawals, and depressing comeback attempts. So this week you’re going to see all the highlights of Woods’ wins at Torrey Pines. He’s got more wins at this course alone than many of the best on the PGA Tour have in their entire career. The U.S. Open putt and fist pump with the accompanying “Expect anything different!” call from NBC’s Dan Hicks will be played. It’s arguably the capstone highlight in a career that’s hard to distill down to just one.

At the end of his career, this is how Woods’ time at Torrey Pines should be captured. There has been too much success to think of it any other way — you play the hits, not the flops. But while the U.S. Open putt may be one of the highest moments in his career, Torrey Pines is also the site of an all-time low. Woods searching for a fix to his chipping woes under the watchful eye of Billy Horschel and Pat Perez on a foggy pre-dawn Torrey Pines range was a little off-putting (there was debate over whether he was asking for help). Then he rocketed a ground-ball shank diagonally across the range, with Perez and Horschel reacting uncomfortably, and it was seared into my memory in the same way as that U.S. Open highlight. I’ve got the video locked in my archives, but I’ll spare you the grisly scene here.

The moment captured so much of how lost and grim it had gotten for Woods. Searching with Perez and Horschel and firing hosel rockets across the range. He would withdraw later that week with what he infamously called deactivated glutes, but not before chipping it all over the yard in front of the cameras one more time.

Over the last four years, this great Tiger + Torrey equation has yielded:

All this came during the ascendance of social media and wall-to-wall TV coverage, so the cameras and tweets were there to chronicle every turn of the recent Torrey Pines ignominy. A place we should remember mostly as Woods’ happy playground became the scene of a pretty grim turn.

Now he’s been off Tour for another full year and is coming back to Torrey. It’s not an easy test, with redesigns of both the South and North courses that have toughened both significantly. Tiger laughed this week when he was asked about the comparison to the old layouts, which often delivered a winner, which was often him, at 20-under or better.

The rough will be high, the greens will be, from all accounts, firm and fast, and the fairways will be narrow. As Geoff Shackelford noted, Woods’ first PGA Tour shot in a year will be into a fairway that’s some 27 yards wide -- not the most comforting way to get back into it. Oh, and also Woods will be chipping from grass that he’s not practiced on in a full year. “I’ve not chipped out of overseeded Rye since Dubai,” he said on Wednesday. Dubai was his last truncated start a year ago. You may think grass is just grass, but at the pro level, it can make all the difference, especially when it comes to a feel part of the game like chipping. And while those 2015 yips haven’t been conspicuously present in the few intervening starts, the anxiety is still there every time we watch him settle in over a chip shot

Woods’ return should provoke excitement, and every time he comes back, we’re going to get a little carried away with it. I did last month at the Hero World Challenge, and that’s just the nature of the beast at this point in his career. I think this comeback is different from the prior failed attempts. I think he’s going to win this year. But there needs to be some balance about this week.

When Woods’ career is over, we’ll just remember Torrey Pines for all the wins and a major title on a broken leg. That’s probably appropriate, too. But the relationship has been a bit more complicated in recent years, and that can get overlooked in the hype of another return. This will be a tough test, and a missed cut seems like the most realistic outcome (as long as he looks healthy, and MC is just fine too). So keep your guard up this week. That way, it will be tough to get disappointed and make his ninth win at Torrey come Sunday that much more staggering and enjoyable.