Tiger Woods returns to TOUR Championship for first time since 2013

ATLANTA – When Tiger Woods won the 2007 TOUR Championship at East Lake, he won by eight shots over Mark Calcavecchia and Zach Johnson. It was a different time.

Now making his first start here in five years, Woods’ biggest win of late has been of the medical variety. His 2017 back fusion surgery continues to hold up, allowing him to summon just enough of his old magic between the ropes to play his way back amongst the game’s elite.

“What I've missed most about playing this event is that in order to get into this event, I would have earned my way in here in being part of the top 30 most consistent players of the year and the best players of the year,” Woods said in his pre-tournament press conference Wednesday. “No exemptions into this event. Either you get here or you don't. It's a very hard line.”

This season began with uncertainty and turned into thrills reminiscent of a time gone by, with Woods compiling six top-10s, including a solo second at the PGA Championship and T2 at the Valspar Championship. Woods played like Woods again, even if only in fits and starts.

Now the question is when he’ll shoot the lowest 72-hole score to notch his 80th PGA TOUR win and first since the 2013 World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational. In addition to crushing the field here in ’07, he finished second in ’09. As he reiterated Wednesday, he likes it here, putts well on the Bermuda greens, even if it’s going to take some time to get used to the reversal of the nines, which happened while he was gone.

What will it take for him to turn one of these top-10s into a win?

“Well, it's always been something (this year),” said Woods, who is 20th in the FedExCup. “You know, it's been I haven't driven it well, I haven't hit my irons well, I haven't chipped well, I haven't putted well. Just pick one of those things, and it happens to be that particular week.

“I seem to have gotten most of those things going well,” Woods added, “but there's always something missing. It could be any of those facets of the game; I just haven't put it all together at the same time. That's something that hopefully will come together this week.”

Whether or not it does, this season will go down as a ‘W’ in the larger sense. Woods has gone from immobility and pain (2017) to the TOUR Championship and a Ryder Cup pick (2018).

As he might say in his understated way, that’s pretty good.

Oddly enough, he said he realized he might be onto something pretty good this season came after he missed the cut at the Genesis Open, one of his worst performances of the year. The aha moment: Woods felt well enough to add a tournament, the Valspar.

“I felt good enough to add a couple more rounds at Tampa,” he said. “If I stayed healthy enough and was progressing along the way I was progressing, I would figure out a way to play this game. I would have to alter my swing a bit, alter my equipment a bit, but I would figure out a way to do it … and so it started early in the year that I could actually do this.”

That said, he added, a day does not go by that he doesn’t think about his fused back. He’s not the same player he was in ’07 or ’02 or 1997, which perhaps makes it all the more remarkable that he’s the envy of everyone who didn’t make the 30-man TOUR Championship and 12-man U.S. Ryder Cup team. He was even asked about playing in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

As he allowed Wednesday, Woods didn’t know at the start of this season whether or not he would survive to see the TOUR’s Florida swing. Now he’s here, at this gathering of the season’s best. He said he’s met his goals, one of which was making it back to the WGC-Bridgestone at Firestone South, where he won eight times and finished T31 this time around.

More than that, he said, he has exceeded his expectations.

“The 'W' category doesn't compare to some of the years I've had where I've won eight or nine times in a year,” Woods said, “but to have come off the last few years of inactivity and to be able to have qualified for East Lake and to be as consistent as I've been and to have put together a game from pretty much nothing, that's something I'm very proud of.”