Tiger Woods returns to the Masters with a real chance to pull off the greatest major win ever

In a parallel universe, the unpredictable whims of the internet would have chosen the photo instead of a crying Michael Jordan. The image, and not an old picture from the basketball Hall of Fame ceremony, could have become the most famous meme of all time.

It’s as despairing a still image of a professional golfer that you’ll see. But it did not come after some crushing one-shot loss at a major championship. Or some inexplicably poor shot at the most critical time. There is not some isolated precipitating event for the photo. The face is draped with exhaustion and sadness, and maybe some pain.

The photo is of Tiger Woods walking off his last hole of the Masters Tournament. A reasonable conclusion in recent years could have been that it was his last hole of the Masters — like, you know, ever. It comes from 2015, a final round Tiger played alongside Rory McIlroy as they hopelessly hit it around Augusta while Jordan Spieth cruised a good 31 lengths ahead. Rory, winner of the preceding two majors and the face of that next generation hip-checking Tiger off the stage, is giving him a pat dripping with sympathy.

Tiger’s last round at the Masters was a 1-over 73 that is probably most memorable for a post-round revelation that he’d healed himself out on the course, adding “A bone kind of popped out, a joint went out of place but I put it back in” to the Tiger canon.

The 2015 Masters finish came after Tiger had missed the prior year at Augusta rehabbing his first back surgery. It also came after Tiger had spent the preceding months in hiding attempting to cure some short game problems that he refused, understandably, to call the chipping yips. But any reasonable golf mind will tell you it was the chipping yips. Arguably the greatest of all time suddenly looked like a high handicap chop, blading and chunking the most basic shots in the game all over the course. A painful back surgery and the most embarrassing on-course display of his career, while a wave of new 20-something talents circled all around, would leave one exhausted and despairing. He looked it in the photo.

Then came a public split with girlfriend Lindsey Vonn, a straight cold top in the middle of the 18th fairway of the U.S. Open, more chipping “troubles,” a second microdiscectomy back surgery, another surgery to “relieve discomfort” in the back, a depressing comeback that lasted 54 holes, a fourth back surgery called spinal fusion, a DUI, a mugshot, dash-cam videos, rehab, and leaked stolen nudes.

So it was reasonable to think the image of Tiger walking off the 18th green in 2015, with Rory patting him on his way, was the the last hole he ever played in the Masters.

That’s the backdrop for the present day incredulity about what we’re watching and hype about what could be next. Pick your pundit: Jim Nantz, Nick Faldo, any writer who has covered the game for decades. The consensus is we arrive at the 2018 Masters with the opportunity, a realistic one, to see one of the greatest sports stories of all time and the greatest comeback of all time. These are subjective things, but however you want to define or measure it, we’re within range of something special happening. That such an opportunity even exists is a gift.

Tiger has come back to public golf this year in a way no one, not even Tiger, could have expected given the damage, some self-inflicted, of recent years. It’s impossible to disentangle Tiger from the public history the world now has with him. That’s why you’ll read, hear, and see throughout Masters week all manner of pop pysch theories on why he’s playing well or why someone still has doubts. But the golf, the actual shots on the course, is there again.

Woods is a real, competitive golfer. There’s been no sign of that in any of his prior, short-lived, depressing comebacks. Those were slogs at every turn. Every hole felt like a challenge, partially covering your eyes because that bad thing you think might happen is probably going to happen. There was nothing pleasurable about those comebacks, regardless off how you feel about Tiger. Now he arrives at Augusta off three top-15 finishes on the Florida swing, including a runner-up in Tampa and a Sunday charge at Bay Hill that whipped the golf world in a frenzy like it was 2005.

Tiger has the power and speed that should not be possible for a 42-year-old who has had four back surgeries and multiple knee surgeries. Even he doesn’t know how he’s registering some of the fastest clubhead and ball speeds measured on the PGA Tour. “I don’t know, it just, it just happened” he said last month. The numbers are not just back to competitive, but they’re the very best. The drives are going 350 and 360 yards. Some of them are the longest out of the entire field for entire tournaments. It is the most conspicuous way to illustrate that this comeback is different.

Beyond the bombs off the tee, this comeback has also seen more reliable putting, precise ballstriking, and the best vintage of short games. We’re nowhere near that yippy stuff we saw leading into his last Masters start. Tiger is executing short game shots from all types of lies and with all types of styles. He’s taking on everything from low spinners to flops, and showing a touch we thought left him four years ago. Tiger, who for the first time in years has enough rounds to now qualify for the PGA Tour’s statistics rankings, is seventh in strokes gained around-the-green. It’s an astonishing reversal from where we were at his last Masters start.

The glue of Tiger’s game, the area that made him arguably the GOAT, is the ballstriking with his irons. He is hailed as the greatest iron player of all time. Tiger is moving the ball in both directions and hitting every kind of shot on approaches. At Riviera, his one missed cut this year, Tiger lamented, “One of my hallmarks of my whole career is I’ve always hit the ball pin high with my iron shots, and I have not done that.” A lot of pros would take hitting the ball pin-high for a week, or half a tournament. That precision returned and stayed with him in Florida. He’s now 15th on the Tour in strokes gained approaching-the-green. His precision wit the irons will be a significant advantage at Augusta, where that’s required.

The driver, while fast and long, remains as wild as ever. There’s no great penal rough at Augusta National, but that inconsistency will haunt him standing over at least a few tee balls. The big hitters have an accentuated advantage at Augusta, as they do at many venues in this era of golf. But it doesn’t help if you can’t keep it in play and Tiger will have to find some middling confidence on a few of those critical driver plays.

Despite the wild driver, which is his one remaining weakness, Tiger is eighth on the PGA Tour in strokes gained total. This bears repeating: He is in the top 10! The bombs off the tee may be the most conspicuous way to illustrate how this comeback looks different. The stats are a measurable way and tell the story, substantively, of a player competing at the highest level and ready to win.

The results corroborate we’re watching a real comeback, but the aesthetics are what draw us in from the start. There’s juice, swag, pep, joie de vivre in the way Tiger is playing again. He’s twirling the club and violently pulling his tee out of the ground after his follow through. He’s walking after the ball when it’s still in the air. He’s fist pumping. There’s aggression in the plays he’s attempting and now executing more often.

Paul Azinger, a former major winner and one of the best analysts in sports, lamented how Tiger had lost the feel that made him the greatest shotmaker the game has ever seen. The line Azinger used so often over the last five or six years was “the artist became an engineer.” Tiger is now without a coach, going it alone for really the first time in his career. He has always had the technical knowledge to coach himself and adjust his own swing. He has the greatest golf brain of all time and the enthusiasm to actually to get in the muck on every detail.

That’s been an asset at times, but it’s also been a hindrance. Tiger played the greatest golf the sport has ever seen at the turn of the century. But he still decided to tear it down and build a new swing, chasing something even better. And he won with that, too. And he won with the next swing, as well, although no majors. The greatest feat of Tiger’s career, the one that captures his historic brilliance more than all the wins, is how he’s been the best in the world with four different swings. No golfer would ever conceive it, let alone try it, and then actually succeed.

The success notwithstanding, there were always going to be critics of the chase. Why change a thing from the swing that yielded the best golf ever played? An excellent 2013 ESPN the Magazine story by Scott Eden chronicled the different swings of Tiger and his chase for the perfect motion through the ball. This was the early stage of the Sean Foley swing era and in the piece, Eden writes, “the greatest act of Woods’ career, the constant and complete reinvention of his game, has been almost universally reviled.”

That’s not the case now in the sunset of his career. Whether it’s the depths of the past few years, the fused back, or some other cause, Tiger is not reinventing but going back. For years now, those in the game and around the game have wondered why he didn’t go it alone. “Tiger doesn’t need a coach. No one on the planet could tell him something about the golf swing he doesn’t already understand at the highest level.” Now he’s on his own, relying more on feel and not an attempt at a perfectly automated and repetitive motion.

The most erotic shot in golf, the Tiger stinger, is back. He even tweeted about it as a tease before his first public event, knowing it would set off the golf world. His irons are moving the ball in both directions at different trajectories. He’s trying all sorts of creative shots around the green with those wedges. At the Valspar, he just let it rip without overthinking, nuking a fairway wood 283 yards uphill pin high. It was a display that wasn’t possible in prior comebacks. At Bay Hill, he shaped a perfect long iron around the lake into the 6th green and knew it right away. He strided after it as it was in the air while tapping the butt-end of his club into the turf, almost to give himself a beat to strut to as it was drawing into the green.

The absence of a coach is not the de facto reason to believe he’s getting back to an older, less robotic approach. He’s said as much, several times, including at that Bay Hill stop. “I’ve gone back to a lot of stuff I used to do with my dad and how he first taught me how to play golf,” he revealed. “I told Rex after the round he asked, ‘what were you thinking on the putt on 17?’ and I said, ‘Just putt to the picture.’ How do you teach a kid when he’s so small and he doesn’t understand an inch and a mile? Well you take a look and you putt to that picture and that’s what I did.”

Tiger’s prior swing changes and coach firings were often “reviled”, as Eden put so well. Whether it’s some old putting tip from his dad or a fix he pulls together on the fly, now there’s nostalgia and an embrace for what he’s doing. Tiger’s health may not permit a sustained run of play, but the engineer is becoming the artist again. It’s aesthetically beautiful and the underlying stats bear out that it’s working.

We can watch Tiger’s swing and pore over the stats, but the psychology is so much harder to discern. That difficulty won’t stop it from being the most discussed and take-ified aspect of Tiger’s return to the Masters. You’ll hear and read line after line about Tiger’s mental state or confidence or attitude. But he’s been through — and created himself by his own actions -- a mental and emotional blender since he was a toddler.

The fact is Tiger has at different times been an incredible dick, kind, sympathetic, an awkward robot, human, cocky, and maybe completely broken and afraid. He could still be all those things right now! It’s particularly tough at this stage of his career, when even he may not know himself after 40 years in the fishbowl. It’s a jumble, but that won’t prevent you from hearing dozens of confident assertions on his mental state and how he’s feeling. Talking about Tiger’s mental state and attitude is a cottage industry.

He does, however, seem to really want to be out there, in the fishbowl, playing golf. That wasn’t always clear in recent years. He will never interact with the crowds like Phil Mickelson and his conveyor belt of thumbs-ups. But there is a dint of appreciation for the people following him. It was there at Riviera this February when it was clear Tiger was going to miss the cut. At the 13th hole he made his third straight bogey and fourth in five holes. In the past, you’d expect him to be despondent and in his own pissed-off tunnel but one fan would not stop. Finally, a “C’mon Tiger you got this shit!” during a dead silent moment got the 14-time major winner to look directly up at the ruffian with a happy and genuine thanks.

There have been repeated instances in this comeback when Tiger seemed to get some sort energy, however small, from the crowd. Tiger did, in fact, not have “this shit” at Riviera but you could not tell from his interactions with crowds and his expressions playing out the string of a missed cut

There is also an appreciation of colleagues. They used to not exist, or if they did, they existed only as enemies and subordinates. Now they’re “the guys” that he just can’t wait to “get back out there with.” He spent the last 25 minutes of his round at Riviera fully engaged with Rory McIlroy, talking with each step on the walk to their ball about their drivers. Both are under contract with TaylorMade so they use comparable technology, and they spent those final moments of his missed cut engrossed on the subject of the driver swing, technology, spin rates, and getting better. In the past, Tiger would spend those last few holes in the tunnel and go directly to his car without interacting.

Tiger has sought the counsel of other pros over the years, but now it’s routine. Their existence is acknowledged. After playing with rookie Sam Burns at the Honda Classic, Tiger sought him out and chatted him up at the next event in Tampa. Exercise caution when making grand pronouncements about his mental state, but this is observable change.

Those close to him will say Tiger’s role as an assistant captain, while injured, on the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup teams has hastened this desire for camaraderie and counsel. The testimonies from inside those teams and the views from outside all conveyed a Tiger absorbed in the role. It’s now seemed to extend, in some small part, to his reentry to the individual game. The question, as so often has been the case with Tiger, is how much is genuine?

More than any week of the golf year, the Masters is the one event where the legends are present and celebrated, and they’re often still playing long after their competitive careers have ended. Bernhard Langer and Fred Couples continue to post competitive numbers deep into their 50s and 60s. Ben Crenshaw won the Masters at age 43, a good 11 years after his first green jacket and entered that 1995 tournament with game he said was in horrible shape. Jack Nicklaus won at age 46 in 1986, as you may have heard. It’s one of the great sports moments of all time, and cited as the greatest Masters ever. Jack had moved on to other business pursuits and entered that week with no real major form. By 1986, he said “I wasn’t really a golfer.”

Tiger is better than Jack and Ben were then. He is younger and enters with real form. He’s shown up before with not a single rep and contended after spending six months in hiding following his sex scandal. He’s shown up after battling the chipping yips and played his way to that late Sunday tee time with McIlroy. Tiger has not been the same player at Augusta since 2006, but he’s still always been a threat never far off the stage. He enters this one in his best shape in five years.

The back is fused and, perhaps as importantly, he’s clean. The spine is the health problem cited first and more often, but his rehab from a prescription drug problem should be noted each time with it. You will not hear about it as much because maybe it’s more uncomfortable or uncertain to talk about on the air. But we understate the impact that problem has had on some of the failure since 2013 and the success of this 2018 comeback.

The resurgence in health is momentary and we do not know what can be sustained. We have spent the last five years sure of the fact that we were robbed of the “still life” portion of Tiger’s career. A brilliant 2011 Brian Phillips piece on Roger Federer described this “still” phase.

The saddest moment in the career of a great athlete is the one when he’s tagged with the word “still.” One day you’re fast. One day you’re slow. There’s an in-between day when you’re “still fast,” and that’s the day when everything hollows out.

Philips wrote Federer had spent more time in that “still” phase than anyone he could remember (and that was seven years ago BTW!). He could still win any tournament he entered at the time, he just wasn’t the invincible Federer we had previous enjoyed and we saw the breakdowns. So we were always looking at the precipice of when it would end and that started to consume the lens with which we viewed the great athlete.

We never saw a precipice with Tiger. He’s never had a “still” phase, going from the invincible to the completely broken down. The bottom fell out and no one saw it coming. He was No. 1 in the world, had played the greatest golf of all time, and then he was hurt and scandalized and gone.

While following Woods for two days at Riviera, the second start in this comeback, the moment that held me most captive did not involve Tiger. It was a chance run-in with his mom, Kultida. I rarely see or hear about his mother anymore so it was captivating moment about a person, quite honestly, that I forget existed. She shuffled in her pink-trimmed Skechers, the preferred footwear of 70-something grandmas, on the arm of Glenn Greenspan, an exec who has long been Tiger’s right-hand man with the media. Thousands scurried and trampled around her running from the 8th green to the 9th tee to try and catch a glimpse of her son’s next hole. She steadied herself on Greenspan and took slow steps in this invincible bubble amidst the chaos that accompanies every Tiger gallery. No one seemed to notice the mom, in her unmistakable and signature visor, of the greatest golfer of all time.

I can’t say why exactly, but the encounter stopped me dead in my tracks — provoking a reflection of the last 20 years of Tiger, running through the images in my head. She’s also now so much older than when the world first got to really know her at that 1997 Masters. She moved slowly and deliberately and with the support of Greenspan. But that visor look was still the same one from 20 years ago, and you couldn’t help but think about how much has happened since then to her, and her son.

After the round, Tiger was asked what it was like to have his mom on the course watching him again. He gave, by Tiger standards, a remarkably detailed and personal answer. “It was nice to have her out there,” he said. “She misses it. She’s seen me go through the struggles, and for her only child to go through those struggles was a little rough on her, so she’s very proud of me getting back out there and playing.” The word “struggles” could have been a reference to so much.

The response was such a departure from the one-word ice daggers he threw at Bill Macatee after finishing multiple Masters in a prior era. It was such a departure from a press conference two years ago when he said he had “nothing to look forward to” and there was “no light at the end of the tunnel.” He could not walk or stand for extended stretches and was confined to his bed for most of his days. The morose press conference gave the strong impression that he was done, and that came before yet another back surgery and the DUI. It was reasonable to believe that depressing image of Tiger walking off the 18th green with Rory was his last hole of the Masters.

Now Tiger comes back as a betting favorite to win his fifth green jacket. The odds are too low but they are there because this is now a golfer with a once-unthinkable chance to win the Masters again. Tiger started this comeback saying he wanted his kids to be able to watch him in action and know him more than just that guy with all the YouTube clips. Four months later, he says he’s a “walking miracle,” a self-view that’s so far from the despairing photo of his last Masters hole. Whatever you think of him as a golfer or a person, and there are many permissible divergent views there, we are within range of the greatest major championship win ever.

Whether you want him to win or not, the historic opportunity that the 2018 Masters presents is one we never thought we’d have. We spend, and often waste, so much time watching and caring about sports for a chance like this to exist. Now we have it.