The world’s 1,294th-ranked golfer arrived on the tee field on Thursday afternoon. The No. 2 participant, Rory McIlroy, was there, too. So was Justin Thomas, ranked seventh.
But the 47-year-old man wedged between William Nygard and Marcos Montenegro in the Official World Golf Ranking nonetheless believed, nevertheless fantastically, that he may win the Genesis Invitational, a event he had by no means conquered.
For all of his scars, that man, Tiger Woods, had barely modified his method to the psychological battleground that so typically separates the sports activities elite from the remaining. His birthday in December didn’t brazenly blunt the competitiveness that raged so intensely for therefore lengthy that it helped outline a whole skilled sport; his disappearing acts from golf didn’t extinguish his hopes of upending his rivals’ ambitions.
What Woods can not masks — certainly, what he doesn’t even strive a lot to masks — is that each aggressive spherical is successfully 18 holes of rehabilitation analysis and improvement. There are days when the experimentation works higher than others. He shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday after which a 74 on Friday, with every stroke and step at Riviera Country Club a information level in his workforce’s quest to make a rebuilt physique hum to a higher-than-normal commonplace.
“The communication between myself, my staff, my training team, it’s an ebb and flow daily trying to figure out the right tape job, the right angles, the padding that we need. That all changes from day to day,” Woods mentioned after Thursday’s spherical. “Look at where we were last year. It has completely changed, and it will continue to change.”
By Friday afternoon, after a spherical marked by poor placing, Woods was additionally confronting the fallout from one other self-inflicted distraction: his passing of a tampon bundle to Thomas after the older man outdistanced the youthful one off the tee, a gesture that was condemned by many as sexist and juvenile.
“It was supposed to be all fun and games, and obviously it hasn’t turned out that way,” Woods mentioned on Friday, when he mentioned the episode amounted to “just friends having fun.”
“If I offended anybody in any way, shape or form, I’m sorry,” he mentioned.
Less than two years in the past, the notion of Woods strolling a course with Thomas, or anybody else, in PGA Tour competitors appeared distant. Professional golf doesn’t ordinarily pair nicely with a fast restoration from a automobile wreck, notably a wreck that almost value one of many sport’s best gamers a leg, and the bodily toll of competitors has appeared immense.
At Augusta National Golf Club final April, when Woods performed the Masters Tournament to make his post-wreck return, he mentioned he would face “lots of treatments, lots of ice, lots of ice baths, just basically freezing myself to death” earlier than the following day’s spherical. After he withdrew from the 12 months’s subsequent main event, the P.G.A. Championship, the place he was 12 over par after three rounds, he deserted his plan to play the U.S. Open as a result of, as he put it later, there was “no way physically I could have done that.” At the British Open in July, after he missed the minimize, he mentioned it was “hard just to walk and play 18 holes.”
“People have no idea what I have to go through and the hours of the work on the body, pre and post, each and every single day to do what I just did,” he mentioned then. About 4 months later, after he concluded that he couldn’t play a low-key occasion in the Bahamas due to plantar fasciitis, he acknowledged with out elaboration that his 12 months had included present process “a few more procedures because of playing.”
Beyond the surgical procedures, his 2022 outcomes had been directly brilliantly defiant — he did, in spite of everything, play 9 rounds at main tournaments lower than two years after he sustained open fractures of the tibia and fibula of his proper leg — and newly humbling. His finest end was forty seventh on the Masters, his worst outing at Augusta National since 1996. (He bounced again from hassle notably nicely in these days: He received his first inexperienced jacket the following 12 months.)
This 12 months threatens, however doesn’t essentially promise, extra of the identical. Now, Woods mentioned this week, an ankle is his best menace.
“Being able to have it recover from day to day and meanwhile still stress it but have the recovery and also have the strength development at the same time, it’s been an intricate little balance that we’ve had to dance,” mentioned Woods, who nonetheless declared that he’s nonetheless very a lot a shotmaker when his endurance matches his ambition. “But it’s gotten so much better the last couple months.”
Riviera, the course west of downtown Los Angeles the place Woods performed his first PGA Tour occasion in 1992, when he was a 16-year-old novice, is however one other laboratory, an in-the-spotlight model of the apply complicated in his yard or Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. Just about day by day, he says, he’s hanging balls, and he’s doing loads of chipping and placing. When he grows weary, he mounts a cart — one thing he can not do on the PGA Tour — however he has seen his outings go from a few holes to 18.
“It’s just a buildup, and it’s built up fantastic to get to this point,” he mentioned. “Then, after this event, we’ll analyze it and see what we need to do to get ready for Augusta.”
There might be a lot to do since, to date this 12 months, he has not walked 72 holes throughout 4 consecutive days, and Augusta is among the many most topographically rigorous locations in golf. But Woods, who intends to take care of a dramatically curtailed enjoying schedule in the long run and isn’t anticipated to compete earlier than the Masters in April, believes that his personal document means he shouldn’t be counted out, not but.
“There was a touch and go whether I would be back after my back fusion,” he mentioned, referring to the complicated operation he had in 2017 after failed again surgical procedures and a want for opioids. “I didn’t know if I was going to walk again after that and I came back and had a nice little run. Same thing with this leg: I didn’t know if I was able to play again and I played three majors last year. Yes, when you get a little bit older and you get a little more banged up you’re not as invincible as you once were.”
But the character of golf, he insisted, makes it attainable to disregard bizarre retirement timelines for athletes.
“There’s no contact, I don’t have 300-pound guys falling on top of me,” mentioned Woods, who remains to be coping with the plantar fasciitis that sidelined him in the autumn. “It’s just a matter of shooting the lowest score. We have the ability to pick and choose and play a little bit longer.”
That is true. Arnold Palmer performed his fiftieth and last Masters in 2004, when he was 74. Gary Player appeared in 52, his final when he was 73.
This week in California, moments after Woods made clear he wouldn’t be trying to match Player or Palmer at Augusta, a reporter requested Woods to look into the long run. “If you’re 60 and you don’t wake up with the irrational belief ‘I could win this tournament,’” the query went, “could you still enjoy any of it?”
Maybe — perhaps — sometime, the response successfully went.
“If I’m playing in the event I’m going to try and beat you. I’m there to get a W, OK?” he mentioned. “So I don’t understand that making the cut’s a great thing. If I entered the event, it’s always to get a W.”
Reality looms, although, and his subsequent sentences confirmed it.
“There will come a point in time when my body will not allow me to do that anymore, and it’s probably sooner rather than later,” he mentioned. But, he mentioned, merely appearing as an envoy for the sport is “not in my DNA.”
Until then, his analysis and improvement will proceed. He began Thursday’s spherical with a 4-foot putt for a birdie. Three bogeys surfaced because the afternoon progressed — and so did three consecutive birdies to finish the afternoon.
“As soon as I get back to the hotel, it’s just icing and treatment and icing and treatment, just hit repeat throughout the whole night,” Woods mentioned.
Friday’s five-bogey displaying prompt that there have been extra tweaks to be made. But when darkness led officers to droop the second spherical on Friday night, Woods was simply contained in the projected minimize line.
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