Tiger Woods is in position to finish his incredible comeback year with a win

This is really all we ever want from sports. On Sunday in Atlanta, we get one of the greatest athletes of all time, whose career was presumed dead, with a chance to complete the best comeback season in the sport’s history with a win. Tiger Woods leads the PGA Tour’s season finale by three shots in an event that has, at times, felt more like 2008 and not 2018. And the two closest chasers are the player once hailed as the “next Tiger” and the current No. 1 player in the world.

The Tour Championship and FedExCup Playoffs have a history of provoking scoffs and eye-rolls because of the buckets of self-importance poured on you all season about it. The majors remain the majors and no matter how many tweaks and overhauls and points changes the Tour makes, golf is just not set up well for a playoffs system across multiple weeks. We don’t have the history with the FedExCup or Tour Championship that we do with the majors. There is a history of some counter-intuitive and boring finishes.

This Sunday is not that. It’s positioned to be the best season-finishing round in the Tour’s history. The opportunity presents us with all we ever want from sports. There’s nostalgia and drama, a comeback from a legend getting back to the kind of dominance we never thought we’d see again, and a group of superstar challengers.

World rankings often do not tell the full story of how a golfer is playing in that moment in time. It can, but the OWGR also frequently misses the mark and is weighted too much in one direction or another, sometimes in the past.

Tiger started the Tour Championship this week at No. 21 in the world but anyone who has watched the PGA Tour for the last two months would say that’s incongruously high. He’s been playing like a top 10 player in the world since the middle of the summer and more recently, closer to a top 5 player in the world.

So it should come as no surprise that he’s starting Sunday with a three-shot lead at this tournament, the season ender on the PGA Tour. If you were told in January, when he started the year as the 666th ranked player in the world, that he would lead the Tour Championship at the 54-hole mark, it would be more than just surprising. It would be incomprehensible. Not credible or believable in any way. But now? Nah, this is just who Tiger Woods is again.

At the moment, Tiger is fifth on the PGA Tour in season cumulative strokes gained-total, the set of advanced metrics we use most often to measure a player’s game. He’s behind only Dustin Johnson, Justin Rose, Justin Thomas, and Bryson DeChambeau. Those are not players slumming it with Tiger down in the 20s of the world rankings. They are four of the top eight in the world rankings and all of them have won this year. Rose is the only player of the four that has not won multiple events on the PGA Tour this season, but he’s been so consistent in all of them that he just happens to be No. 1 in the world.

This is the company Tiger’s game is now keeping. The part of his game that’s been the impetus for this dramatic rise back to the top of golf is his ballstriking. He is the best iron player in the history of golf. At the start of the season at Riviera, in just his second event of the comeback, he expressed frustration at that iron game deserting him.

“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,” he said after the missed cut in February. “My wedge game is fine, but my normal iron shots that I’ve always had dialed in for much of my entire career, it’s just not there.”

Now? This week he moved into No. 1 on the PGA Tour’s season-long strokes gained approach-the-green statistic. After four back surgeries, a DUI, rehab, and two years of playing almost no competitive golf, he’s back to being the very best in the game at the thing he’s the best at in the history of the game.

So it should not surprise you that he’s leading at the smallest, most exclusive event of the year. Tiger leads Rory McIlroy and Rose with 18 more holes to play at East Lake. The ballstriking is back but so is the power and the stones to execute it at the right time. Another stout Tiger statistic this week comes at the hefty par-5 finishing hole. Tiger and Dustin Johnson, you know, the renowned biggest hitter in the game, were the only players to get home in two successfully in the opening round at 18 on Thursday. But how about consecutively in both rounds?

There’s power off the tee and precision with his irons and the putter is not letting him down and even occasionally converting bonus birdies. We saw the putter come through on Saturday and all of a sudden, he was racing out to a five-shot lead and threatening to break 30 on his front nine. As long as the putter does not completely leave him, his game is too good to not contend and then complete the win on Sunday afternoon.

This is Tiger’s only remaining chance to add a win in this comeback season. With just 29 other players in the field, it’s perhaps his best opportunity of the year. The field is small but he’ll have to beat the absolute best in the world. Rose and Rory are now the closest chasers and around him on the leaderboard this week have been Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler, and others that have dominated the game in Woods’ absence the last two years.

His return to Atlanta for the first time in five years led to a massive spike in interest in the event, with ticket sales up some 170 percent. Now he’s sitting on a lead with the generation of superstars he inspired into the game all around him and the PGA Tour is salivating at the Sunday ahead for their postseason finale. Maybe they can kind of, sort of, put a small dent in the football monopoly in this last year before they move the schedule ahead to get away from that sport’s dominance of their postseason.

Tiger’s game is now back among the class of player that surround him and are now chasing him on the leaderboard. Seeing him on the Sunday lead in Atlanta is not some earth-shattering revelation. This does not take away from the shock of watching him get to this point over the course of this season. It is maybe the greatest comeback in the history of the sport. He said this week he started the year just trying to make it to the Florida swing. That’s the stretch of tournaments that begin in February. It’s now September and he made it to the most exclusive and toughest invite of the season. The one that only 30 players get to at the end. It’s incredible that he got here, but that he’s leading, in the context of his play, is not. Now comes the last piece: getting that first win in five years.