As Tiger Woods’s perfectly struck eight-iron shot rolled slowly down the steep sixteenth green at Augusta National on Sunday afternoon, he eyed it like a hawk, mouthing, “Come on, come on, come on.” The ball obeyed, eventually stopping about eighteen inches from the hole, virtually assuring Woods of a two-shot lead with two holes to go in the eighty-third edition of the Masters Tournament. But as the “patrons” hollered—Augusta is the sort of place that considers the word “crowd” gauche—Woods remained impassive. While other players in his group—Francesco Molinari, the overnight leader, and Tony Finau—took their shots, Woods stood beside his caddy Joe LaCava, his face a mask.
What was the forty-three-year-old native of Orange County, whose late father, Earl, handed him a golf club at the age of two, thinking to himself? If he were anybody else, his mind surely would have gone back to one of the many moments in the past decade when the chances of him winning another major championship had appeared to be very remote.
To December, 2009, perhaps, when he checked in to a Mississippi sex-therapy clinic after his marriage and many of his corporate endorsements imploded in a tabloid infidelity scandal. Or to February, 2015, when yet another attempted comeback from chronic back injuries ended with him hobbling off the course after just eleven holes at Torrey Pines, where he had won his last major, the 2008 U.S. Open. The previous week, in Phoenix, Woods had shot an eighty-two, his highest score since he turned professional, in 1996. At that juncture, many people in golf believed he was done, and not just because of his bad back. At Phoenix, he had duffed a number of simple greenside chips. Brandel Chamblee, the Golf Channel analyst, said that it was “the worst I’ve ever seen a tour pro around the greens.” It was as if Nijinsky had lost the ability to do a simple sauté.
Although others gave up on Woods, he never gave up on himself. Earl, a fine athlete who broke the color line when he played baseball at Kansas State, in the early nineteen-fifties, and who subsequently joined the U.S. Army and did two tours in Vietnam, had taught him never to quit—or even to conceive of the possibility. Woods kept going, even when, in May, 2017, his bleary-eyed mug shot went around the world, after police found him asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes, near his home in Jupiter, Florida. A month earlier, he had undergone his fourth back surgery—a “spinal fusion.” He said in a statement that he had experienced “an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications,” and a toxicology test showed traces of four different drugs in his system. By the end of 2017, when he finally returned to competitive golf, he had tumbled to six hundred and sixty-eighth in world golf rankings. (In the ratings system, absence from the game costs players points.)
Tiger being Tiger, it is safe to assume that he didn’t let any of this stuff enter his mind on the sixteenth tee, or at any other point during his round. Self-focussed to an extreme, even by the standards of golf, which is a loner’s sport, he has always had the ability to blot out the world—or, some might say, the unwillingness to acknowledge and buckle to it. (According to a book by the sportswriter Rick Reilly, Earl Woods’s mantra for his son’s early career was “We came. We saw. We won. We got the f*** out of town.”) Since his most recent comeback, Woods has been somewhat more collegial on and off the course, but the iron will and fanatical competitiveness are still there, as was eminently clear on Sunday.
“I was just trying to plod my way around the course all day,” Woods said later. Starting out two shots behind Molinari, a methodical Italian who won the British Open last year, he shot a solid front nine, making up one shot. But then he bogeyed the tenth after a wayward drive, and the margin widened to two again. On the eleventh green, Molinari missed a makeable putt to go three ahead, which could have proved decisive. Then disaster struck. At the tricky par-three twelfth, Molinari hit his tee shot into a pond short of the green. Inexplicably, so did Finau and Brooks Koepka, a Tigeresque twenty-eight-year-old who won three of the previous six majors. The actual Tiger, now a balding old pro, took a safe line to the middle of the twelfth green, two-putted for a par, and walked off as the joint leader. A birdie on the famous par-five thirteenth put him on top of the leaderboard by himself.
In his prime, Woods was the greatest front-runner that golf, or possibly any sport, has seen. Once he got his nose ahead, he almost always won. At last year’s British Open, however, he took the lead on the last day, only to give it away with a double bogey on the eleventh hole. At the P.G.A. Championship, the last major of 2018, he closed to within one shot of Koepka on the final day but never quite caught him. To some, these experiences seemed like more evidence of Woods’s descent to mere mortality. To him, they provided confirmation that, even though he no longer hits the ball as far as some of the younger players and his putter isn’t quite as reliable as it was in the days when he never seemed to miss, he could still compete in majors—and win them.
On Sunday, he never looked likely to lose once he grabbed the lead. Facing a swirling wind that made shot selections difficult, he used his experience and course knowledge to avoid dangerous areas, and his swing was good enough for him to execute the shots he needed most. His tee shot on the sixteenth was typical. Rather than going straight at the pin, which was in its traditional spot, tucked near the bunker at the rear of the green, he aimed twenty feet right, caught the ball sweetly, and let gravity do the rest. As he walked off the green with a two-shot lead, Verne Lundquist, the veteran CBS sportscaster who has witnessed some of Woods’s greatest moments at Augusta, including a twelve-shot victory in 1997 that announced him as a sports phenomenon, said, simply, “Oh my goodness.”
After making a routine par four on the seventeenth hole, Woods took a three-wood off the tee for safety on the perilously narrow eighteenth, allowed himself a second-shot layup short of the green, chipped on, and calmly two-putted for a one-shot victory. It was his fifth Green Jacket and his elusive fifteenth major. After embracing Finau, a Ryder Cup teammate, and shaking hands with Molinari, he looked for LaCava and embraced him tightly. Through what looked like tears of joy, he said, “We did it. We did it.” In that emotional moment, it was possible to imagine that Woods, too, had harbored some doubt about whether this outcome would ever be possible. But in a post-round interview LaCava batted away this suggestion, saying, “He’s a very confident person, so he always thought he could do it.”
Ten years and ten months after that U.S. Open victory at Torrey Pines, he finally did do it—prompting some commentators to hail his achievement as the greatest comeback in golf, or maybe all of sports. We can rest assured that Woods himself won’t waste much time weighing comparisons between what happened on Sunday and Ben Hogan winning the 1950 U.S. Open, after suffering a serious car crash, in 1949, or Muhammad Ali knocking out George Foreman, in 1974. He’ll be too busy practicing and preparing. The next major championship will take place at Bethpage, on Long Island, in four and a half weeks. Woods won the 2002 U.S. Open there. Now just three behind Jack Nicklaus’s tally of eighteen majors, he will be looking to win again.
