1THE LEGACY
Tiger Woods didn’t want to hear it the first time. And when he heard it again, he made it clear—forcefully—that perhaps the conversation ought to move on to something else.
The golf world knew he was in pain and that he was trying to play for the first time since a relatively minor knee procedure several weeks earlier. But nobody knew what was really going on, save for a few souls close to Woods.
One of them was his caddie, Steve Williams, who upon seeing Woods was shocked to witness such poor form. He had not been with Woods since the Masters Tournament, and now he was trying to get ready for the U.S. Open two months after the procedure, which was meant to take care of some issues with his knee and which Woods figured would be routine.
A practice round days prior to the start of the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego was horrifically poor.
Worse, Woods could barely walk. He learned as part of that “benign” knee procedure that his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) was completely shot and would need surgery to be reconstructed. And to make the situation worse, he had suffered two stress fractures in the tibia of his left leg while trying to rehabilitate the knee.
The damaged knee was bad enough, but those stress fractures caused immense pain every time he swung the club and struck the ball, not to mention with every step he took over the Southern California course.
The opening round saw Woods walk eighteen holes for the first time in months, and discomfort and pain were evident throughout. Williams, who had been working with Woods since 1999 and as his caddie for twelve major championships, wondered—aloud—if this was a good idea.
“I think I said to him on three separate occasions, asked him if it was the right thing to carry on,” Williams says. “And I got the same reply each time: ‘Fuck you, Stevie, I’m winning this tournament.’”
Woods didn’t want to hear it.
“I wasn’t going to say it to him again,” Williams says.
It is the sort of drive that has marked Woods’ career, the trait beneath all the talent, sometimes to his own detriment.
Woods could bomb it farther, strike his irons crisper, hit his chip shots closer, make putts with his eyes closed. His skills undoubtedly would have carried him to numerous victories. But without that uncanny determination, a resiliency that saw him return from all manner of maladies or obstacles, the record unarguably would not be as great.
There’s no way he wins that U.S. Open at Torrey Pines without such guile. Or makes 142 consecutive cuts on the PGA Tour without immense pride. Or wins the Masters after shooting a first-nine 40, the gaze of the golf world upon a 21-year-old who had already taken the game by storm. Or all manner of feats going back some thirty years.
Perhaps his biggest win was his epic 2019 Masters victory, one that saw him return from a career-threatening back procedure to beat players a decade or more younger on golf’s grandest stage, the crowning achievement of his Hall of Fame career. Five years on from his fifteenth major championship title, you cannot help but consider all that went into that victory.
The win required great fortitude, given what he was up against physically, not to mention a slew of young stars who may have idolized Tiger but were not afraid of him. Why would they be? He was undoubtedly physically diminished. He could not practice and prepare as often as they did. The last time he won a major championship, many of them were in grade school.
And while his results leading up to that Masters were solid—he had won the Tour Championship seven months earlier—victory at a course where he had not won in fourteen years was something to talk about, dream about. It was far from something to expect.
Less celebrated but in many ways just as impressive was his return from a horrific car crash in February of 2021 that severely damaged his right foot, ankle, and leg.
Woods had numerous surgeries, couldn’t walk for months, and somehow managed to play the 2022 Masters, opening the tournament with a 71 and making the 36-hole cut while traversing the undulating course with a noticeable limp.
Woods probably summed it up best at the 2023 Masters, where he was playing just his fifth official event since the crash, and what would be his last for some time.
“Stubbornness,” he said. “I’m a little on the stubborn side. I believe in hard work, and I believe in getting out of it what you put into it. I’ve worked very hard throughout my career and in my craft; I’ve always loved it.
“I’ve certainly had my share of adversity physically and had multiple surgeries and I’ve had to come back and work through that. Those were tough. They were never easy. But it’s just that the overall desire to win has always been there, and I’ve always worked at it and believed in what I could do.
“I’ve been stubborn and driven to come back and play at a high level. I think that has been shown throughout my career. And it’s one of the reasons why I was able to make how many cuts I’ve been able to make in a row and how many tournaments I’ve been able to win over the course of my career.
“And that’s just hanging in there and fighting on each and every shot. It means something. Each and every shot means something.”
* * *
Those words were uttered six years to the day that everything changed for Woods: April 4, 2017. The date is not historically significant, other than the fact that what seemed like the end was actually the beginning. He hardly knew it at the time—heck, the man could barely walk—but it was noteworthy in ways that took years to recognize.
For the second straight time and third time in four years, Woods was not playing in the Masters due to back troubles that had plagued him going back to 2013—and perhaps longer. A return to competition earlier in 2017 was aborted after just three full rounds, halfway around the world in Dubai, where Woods had to withdraw from a European Tour event at which he was being paid handsomely simply to show up.
For one of the rare times with Woods, it was money poorly spent. Tiger looked old and hobbled, and despite saying otherwise, was in considerable pain. An opening round without a birdie at Dubai in early February was but one clue. The way he walked, the way he carefully navigated mounds and bunkers and tees—everything—suggested something was amiss. He withdrew after just eighteen holes, with hopes he might be back in a couple of weeks, which turned into months, which turned into … the entire year.
Woods had good reason for the prolonged absence: He had a herniated disk in his lumbar spine.
At first, Woods’ agent, Mark Steinberg, reported that the golfer had back spasms but they were not specifically related to the three microdiscectomy procedures he had done in 2014–15. However, it later turned out to be exactly related to those issues. The fact that he had this procedure not once but three times—including twice within six weeks in 2015—was not a good sign.
And sitting out all of 2016 before his brief return apparently did not alleviate the problems, and certainly not the pain.
But Woods summoned the strength to get to Augusta National for the annual Champions Dinner on that Tuesday in April. Dustin Johnson, the No. 1–ranked player in the world coming off a victory at the Match Play Championship and a torrid stretch of golf, was the main source of conversation that day.
The groupings and starting times were announced, and Johnson was scheduled to tee off in the last threesome with reigning PGA Championship winner Jimmy Walker and two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson.
As late as a week earlier, Woods was on the pre-tournament interview schedule for that day, his inability to play not disclosed until just a few days prior to Augusta National opening to the masses. Normally the big story of any Tuesday, Woods was absent.
So it fell to Johnson (who would withdraw minutes before his tee time due to a back injury suffered during a fall at his rental home), defending champion Danny Willett, fellow green jacket winners Adam Scott, Phil Mickelson, and Jordan Spieth, plus Rory McIlroy, Henrik Stenson, Jason Day, and Justin Rose to fill notepads and interview rolls.
“His lack of presence is felt here, because he would bring so much to the tournament,” said Mickelson, echoing the comments of others who were asked.
While it was once again a blow to have Woods miss the tournament, golf fans and those who competed against him were getting used to the idea. Going back to the fall of 2015, Woods had played just three worldwide tournaments. He would end up missing eight consecutive major championships throughout 2016 and 2017.
The very venues where his greatness shone brightest came and went without him. And at the 2017 Masters, Woods was missed, but the tournament would go on without him—again.
Very few knew that during the afternoon, while all those pre-tournament media sessions were taking place, Woods arrived early to be interviewed by Jim Nantz, the longtime CBS Sports broadcaster who had been working the Masters since 1986.
Nantz was to conduct an interview with Woods that would not be for public consumption. The then-four-time Masters champion had agreed to the conversation, which was being produced for Augusta National, never to be aired, meant for the club’s archives.
What Nantz heard that day shook him. Woods sounded almost despondent, resigned to a fate without competitive golf. And it led Nantz to believe we very likely would never see Woods competing at a high level again, let alone winning another Masters.
“I thought he was uncomfortable,” Nantz says. “His every movement I thought brought pain. We sat down and I can’t tell you how long it went. He just did a good job on that interview. He was so openhearted.
“There was a sense of resignation in his voice. He was talking in the past tense; he wasn’t looking forward. He was reviewing his career at Augusta as if it had been completed. That’s what struck me most of all. He wasn’t talking like he was still in the game at Augusta. He was reviewing what he had done there without leaving any sliver of any indication of hope that he was going to be coming back there. He didn’t say he was done, but he talked like someone who was reviewing his playing days as if they were final.
“With all the highs and lows he had to live with and being very public in his life, I think the lowest of the lows for him was probably that very night. Coming to the Champions Dinner and having to turn around and leave. From a golf perspective, it had to be the lowest of lows. He felt a sense of being done.”
Woods later acknowledged, “I was done.” At least that is what he believed in those dark, painful moments.
And why would he have thought anything else?
Woods needed help to navigate the stairs in the Augusta National clubhouse. He had taken a nerve block prior to attending in order to alleviate pain. Past champions Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player would later disclose that Woods had suggested his career was over, that he was simply looking for quality-of-life relief. But it was another former champion who was the first to lift the lid publicly.
Only sixteen months later, after Woods would remarkably contend in two major championships in 2018, three-time Masters winner Nick Faldo went on the Dan Patrick radio show and told a tale that had never been expressed openly: that Woods said at that Champions Dinner his career was finished.
The details were fuzzy, and who told whom what and exactly where was something that Woods was not going to delve into after the Faldo story came out. I carefully broached the subject with Woods while he prepared for the Northern Trust tournament, his next event following that PGA Championship, at Ridgewood Country Club in New Jersey.
It was territory that Woods did not want to travel. He was annoyed the story had come out, and it felt possible he might shut this conversation down, and quickly. Knowing how Woods was about these matters, getting him to say anything of consequence seemed hardly a positive proposition.
“I didn’t know what I was going to be doing,” he said while in between shots of the tournament pro-am. “I had no golf in my future at that time. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit. I left from there to go see a specialist about what my options were.”
Even that story has a backstory.
Woods has always kept a small, tight team around him and was never one to offer many details. But one of those helping him was a Fort Lauderdale physical therapist named Dan Hellman.
Hellman, an avid golfer, practiced physical therapy on young and old, athletic and non-athletic, taking an interest in helping those with various injuries associated with the game.
Hellman studied extensively under a pioneering French osteopath whose training and therapy method Hellman advocated. The program focuses on training for high-level athletes, along with treatments. Hellman developed a program for golfers with something he undoubtedly tailored for Woods specifically when he began working with him sometime in 2016. He attended his first tournament with Woods later that year at the Hero World Challenge, where Woods showed promise before his season was shut down just a short time later.
“We worked for six to eight months to try and get him to be able to play without surgery,” Hellman says. “He was at the point where we needed to seriously look at this. ‘Forget being a golfer, but we need to get you healthy for life. If you can play golf again, that’s a bonus.’ At that point, beers on the golf course was the goal.”
It was Hellman who convinced Woods that he needed to consult with a team that would recommend a best course of action. “I knew that any surgeon in their right mind would want to operate on him,” Hellman says. “But I didn’t want to start calling around to surgeons.”
So Hellman reached out to a colleague he knew in London, Jon Bowskill, who specialized in finding the right doctors for patients. After that arduous day at Augusta National, Woods headed to the Augusta Regional Airport and left for London, enduring a most uncomfortable flight before meeting with a team of people who not only ran a bunch of tests but were the vetters for a U.S.-based doctor to handle Woods’ surgery.
“He came back with Dr. Guyer,” Hellman says.
That would be Dr. Richard Guyer, who cofounded the Center for Disc Replacement at the Texas Back Institute near Dallas. A spinal fusion, something Guyer had performed thousands of times in his career, was prescribed.
“I wasn’t confident; I was having a fusion,” Woods says. “At that time, I needed to try and get rid of the pain. It wasn’t so much about golf. I tried everything. I tried stem cell; I tried lidocaine; I tried Marcaine—nerve block. Nothing took the pain away.”
Little time was wasted. The surgery was scheduled for April 19, 2017.
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Harig
