Oh, Tiger
It's impossible to know when the greatest golfer of his generation will be seen in public again. Let's just hope he gets a driver next time
It must drive the green-jacketed titans of industry who run Augusta National Golf Club more than a little crazy that the tournament that they control to the utmost degree, down to the last blade of grass, has so often been buffeted by the winds of Storm Tiger.
In 2010, the big story was the return of Tiger Woods to professional golf amid the lush foliage of the famous track, with the Masters providing a soft landing after his self-imposed exile due to revelations of a truly remarkable amount of marital infidelity.
It was, it would turn out, one of the last times that Woods would arrive at Augusta without many questions about his health. He would miss the tournament three times in subsequent years (2014, 2016-17) as a result of back surgeries and again in 2021 after surviving a rollover that led to major surgery on one of his legs. When he returned to competitive golf at the Masters in April of 2022, the question wasn’t whether he could win but whether he could even complete four rounds while limping over Augusta’s famously hilly grounds.
And now he has disappeared again after yet another car accident, this time flipping his vehicle after a collision with another motorist near his Florida home. He’s been charged with driving under the influence after he refused a breathalyzer test. He’s seeking treatment somewhere outside of the United States, but will again be humiliated by the latest incident, which included him placing a call to Donald Trump post-accident — yes, really — and then informing the arresting officer of this fact, who according to bodycam footage was not the least bit impressed.
Instead of being an elder statesman this week at Augusta and continuing his transition to becoming one of the most influential executives in pro golf, Woods is instead on the receiving end of sympathy and jokes, and not necessarily in that order.
Has anyone as successful as him had a self-destructive streak quite like this guy? I cannot come up with a comparable.
It’s easy to forget, amid the slow-motion train wreck that was his career for the last 15 years or so, just how good he was in the early years. In the six seasons beginning in 1997, he won eight major golf championships, including the four-in-a-row Tiger Slam over the 2000-01 seasons. For reasons only known to Woods, he then ditched his coach and remade his swing, trading a fade for a draw, which led to a couple of lean years. But with the new swing eventually mastered, he went on another run, winning six majors in the four seasons beginning in 2005. The last of them, the U.S. Open on a bum knee in 2008, is simply one of the greatest athletic feats ever performed.
And then it all went to shit. The injury layoff, the infidelity scandal, and a ceaseless run of yet more injuries, mostly back-related, that at one point left him almost immobile. What made that all even harder to believe was that he had seemed so invincible in his prime. He won at a rate that just wasn’t done in professional golf.
Look at the results produced by his multiple-major winning peers in the modern game, and a clear trend emerges: players who achieved big success tended to do it over brief windows.
Rory McIlroy: 4 majors 2011-14, 1 in 2025
Brooks Koepka: 4 majors 2017-19, 1 in 2023
Jordan Spieth: 3 majors in 2015-17, none since
Jon Rahm: 1 major in 2021, 1 major in 2023
Dustin Johnson: 1 major in 2016, 1 major in 2020
Bryson DeChambeau: 1 major in 2020, 1 major in 2024
Collin Morikawa: 2 majors in 2020-21, none since
Justin Thomas: 1 major in 2017, 1 major in 2022
Scottie Scheffler: 4 majors in 2022-25
Vijay Singh: 3 majors in 1998-2004
Nick Faldo: 6 majors in 1987-1996
Phil Mickelson: 3 majors in 2004-06, 2 majors in 2010-13, 1 in 2021
Would the above have looked better in some kind of chart? Yes. Anyway.
What you see is that Tiger’s first run of eight majors in six years would have left him alone atop the leaderboard over the past 30 years, and his second run of six majors in four would also have put him at the top, on its own, although tied with Mickelson. (And Faldo, who only briefly overlapped with Woods as top professionals.)
Put another way, the second-best stretch of Tiger’s career was better than the entire career of any of his peers, save Phil and Faldo. (And it was tied with those guys.) It is insane.
(Scheffler, with a couple more major wins this season, would at least have had one truly Tiger-like run, but would still be nine back on the career chart. And other active players could yet go on major-winning runs and change the calculus.)
But another way to look at that list above is that none of those golfers have had even a fraction of the off-course drama of Woods. Maybe the same things that drove him to such ridiculous professional heights were always likely to lead to some kind of personal collapse. The stories about his father, Earl, driving him to the edge of the mental breaking point just to harden his nerves, once recited with a degree of reverence when Tiger was winning everything, now just look like bad parenting.
For a long time, part of the reason the interest in Tiger was so high was because it was possible to imagine some kind of triumphant return, the sport’s greatest player dominating like his old self once again. It’s long been clear that was never going to happen, but his latest retreat from the public eye underlines something that’s kind of depressing: the uncertainty isn’t whether he will play good tournament golf again, it’s whether he will ever have a normal life.
To be clear, my sympathies only extend so far. I don’t doubt that he had a messed-up family life, and the level of fame he achieved at a young age would have been a burden. But he has been given so many chances to sort his shit out. You are worth a billion dollars, man. Get a therapist. And, please, get a driver.
Next April the golf world will reconvene at Augusta for what will be the 30th anniversary of Woods’ seminal Masters win, the one that changed the sport forever. Will Tiger even be there to celebrate? We shall see.