The quest resumes today, even if the cheering does not.
Tiger Woods is back on the PGA Tour, once again chasing the all-time tour record for victories. Only this time, the most watched golfer in history will get the same silent treatment as every other competitor in the age of coronavirus and social distancing.
No grandstands. No walking gallery. No roars. And, if we're being realistic, probably no record.
At least not this weekend at the Memorial Tournament in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. It's been five months since we've seen Woods in a PGA event, and that weekend he finished dead last among the 68 golfers who made the cut.
It's not that Woods isn't still capable. Since the spring of 2019, he's won two of his 10 tour events along with four top-10s. And when he tied Sam Snead's record of 82 tour victories last October at the ZOZO Championship in Japan, he was coming off another knee surgery and a nine-week layoff.
But extraordinary comebacks are, by definition, implausible. And, at age 44, even miracle workers tend to slow down.
"Well, I would like to say that I'm going to win the event. That's my intent coming in here," Woods said Tuesday at a virtual news conference. "Whether that plays out over the next four _ well, come Sunday, hopefully that will be the case. It was ... three tournaments ago at ZOZO. There's no reason why I can't do it again this week."
Truthfully, there are a lot of reasons. Many of the same reasons that got us to this point.
If it seems as if Woods has been chasing this record forever, it's because he's been on the cusp of breaking it for so long.
His first 79 victories on the PGA Tour were a relative breeze. Oh, there were the knee injuries and the marital problems that bedeviled Woods a little more than a decade ago, but those were a mere hiccup compared to what came next.
Woods was just 36 when he passed Jack Nicklaus for second on the all-time PGA Tour list in 2013 and, at the time, had won eight tournaments in the previous two years. At the pace he was going, it was likely he would catch Snead early in 2014.
But four back surgeries later, nothing was certain.
Woods went more than five years without a tour victory, and the combination of knee, Achilles and back injuries seemed never-ending. A player who had always been picky about the number of tournaments he played in, Woods was now forced to be even more particular.
"I've had to try and maximize every tournament start since I've had my last back procedure," he said. "I really haven't played that much since then. I think that, unfortunately over the last few years, that I've been used to taking long breaks, (a) long time off and having to build my game to where it's at a Tour level at home, and then come out and play a few tournaments here and there. That's something I have, unfortunately, been accustomed to."
It's a shame, really, that it's led to a perception of Woods taking an inordinate amount of time to catch Snead. Woods has won a slightly higher percentage of tournaments (22.7) than Snead had (22.1) at the same age and he's far ahead of where Nicklaus was (16.9) at that age.
In other words, he is not Pete Rose hanging around for years past his prime simply to chase down Ty Cobb. Even with his latest hiatus, Woods is still the 14th-ranked player in the world. He is one year removed from winning the Masters for his 15th victory in a major and he is still, far and away, the Tour's biggest draw.
That doesn't mean he will win this weekend, but he seems likely to eclipse Snead's 55-year-old record before too long.
"I don't think Tiger will be as sharp or as ready as he normally is, but Tiger is Tiger," Nicklaus said at Tuesday's news conference. "He's a pretty darned good player, and my guess is he played quite a bit of golf at home, and he doesn't want to come here and not play well."
Now, about Nicklaus' record of 18 wins in majors ...
