Tiger Woods still doing hard, painful work

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Tiger Woods laughed when asked about the prospect of joining Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson to hit the ceremonial first tee shot at the 88th Masters Tournament.

“No, I have not thought about being a starter here, no,” Woods said.

And yet is it also laughable to think that he could still win this week?

He doesn’t think so.

“If everything comes together, I think I can get one more,” said Woods, 48, who will be paired with Jason Day and Max Homa for the first two rounds at Augusta National. A silence came over the main interview room, and Woods, economical with his words as ever, laughed. “Do I need to describe that any more than that, or are we good?”

Where are we with Tiger Woods? Who is he these days? What is he capable of? It speaks to the dizzying, tilt-a-whirl landscape of professional golf that we have lost track of even him.

If everything comes together … That might be only the second or third biggest if in golf. He still gets out of bed every day intending to do the hard and painful work with his physical therapist. He loves the game too much to quit on it; "Golf is life," to paraphrase Dani Rojas from “Ted Lasso.”

And yet the 82-time PGA TOUR winner, including 15 majors, is a realist. He struggled in his last start, The Genesis Invitational, and withdrew with the flu after completing just 24 holes. More often, he is limited by inflammation and flare-ups that he can’t predict from one day to the next.

“Some days I just feel really good,” Woods said, “and other days, not so much.”

He played in his first Seminole Pro-Member with PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh on March 4. (Woods is believed to be the first choice to be U.S. Ryder Cup captain at Bethpage Black next year.) Since then, the Tiger-trackers haven’t had much to work with, but Fred Couples filled up some notebooks after he, Woods and Justin Thomas played the front nine here under cloudy skies Tuesday.

“Can he win here?” said Couples, who himself is battling a bad back. “You know what, yeah. I just watched him play nine holes, and nine holes is only nine holes on a Tuesday, but he never mishits a shot. But the idea of making a (record 24th consecutive) cut, I think he would laugh at that because he's not here to – that's a huge record, but he's here to win. He's here to play really, really hard.

“From what I see – I don't ask him much,” Couples continued. “We always talk about Sam or Charlie (Woods’ children); very rarely, ‘How is your ankle?’ His ankle is bad. We know it. But it looks like he's here, he's going to walk 72 holes, and if he keeps playing like that, he'll be a factor.”

The fused right ankle, which Woods had fixed after withdrawing from last year’s Masters – he had just tied the all-time record with his 23rd straight made cut – doesn’t hurt, he said. Everything else does.

“Every shot that’s not on a tee box is a challenge,” he said of the hilly Augusta terrain.

The 40s are a fraught time for professional golfers, who aren’t yet eligible for PGA TOUR Champions and must rely on defiance, guile and grit as they strain for whatever it was that made them elite. Players of this vintage can surprise – think Kenny Perry, Vijay Singh and Steve Stricker. Think Woods, going off one last time like a long-abandoned firework at the 2019 Masters as he won a fifth green jacket.

More often, though, they get into broadcasting or just look for the nearest unlit exit.

Woods occupies some ill-defined middle ground. His 2019 Masters win was enough to make you believe in transcendence, or at least physical therapy. Injuries from his 2021 single-car accident, though, have limited his recent play. He has not gone four rounds in an official PGA TOUR event since the 2023 Genesis Invitational. At last year’s Masters he was stopped with plantar fasciitis and withdrew. He flew to New York to undergo ankle fusion surgery, which kept him out of PGA TOUR competition until the unofficial Hero World Challenge last December. By this point, we’d lost count of his comebacks.

Buoyed by his ability to get through four rounds at the Hero, where he finished near the bottom of the limited field, Woods stated that he hoped to play once a month in 2024.

That has not come to fruition.

“Well, I wasn't ready to play,” he said Tuesday, when asked about having missed the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, which he’s won eight times, and THE PLAYERS Championship, which he’s won twice. “My body wasn't ready. My game wasn't ready. And I thought that when I was at Hero, once a month would be a really nice rhythm. Hasn't worked out that way.

“But now we have major championships every month from here through July,” Woods continued. “So now the once-a-month hopefully kicks in.”

His body likes the heat, and Augusta is not expected to be as cold and miserable as last year. It’s a start.

Who is Woods now? Since last summer, he’s a Player Director on the PGA TOUR Policy Board. He’s the presumed 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup captain. He’s the better-known but not necessarily longer-hitting teammate to Charlie at the PNC Championship. And, for now, he’s a contestant at the Masters.