Tiger Woods’s first real memory of the Masters is of watching Jack Nicklaus play on the Sunday of 1986. Woods was 10 and had been out to play nine holes with his dad that morning but they were back in front of the TV in time to see Nicklaus, then 46, come round the turn in one of the most famous rounds in the history of the majors. From six shots back he made five birdies and an eagle and won by one. Woods remembers watching him hit that famous second shot on the 15th, from the hill over the water and to 12 feet from the hole, and the way he raised both fists in the air to celebrate, and wondering why he was so happy when he still had to make the putt.
Over the years Woods has asked Nicklaus, more than once, what he was thinking about in that moment. Woods never really got a good answer out of Nicklaus but, according to his book Unprecedented, this is the way he has come to think about it: “He did what he needed to do to put himself in a position to win the Masters. He was not thinking about winning. He was thinking only about the shot and what he needed to do. He wasn’t getting ahead of himself.”
Thirty-six years later Woods is 46 himself, a month older now than Nicklaus was when he became the oldest man to win the tournament. And of course he is planning on breaking that record. No one, not even Woods himself, gave him a chance of doing it after the car crash last February, when he lost control of his SUV while he was doing double the speed limit on a stretch of mountain road outside Los Angeles. No one even thought he was going to make it here this year. “I never left my hospital bed even to see my living room for three months.” After that he still had months in a wheelchair, and on crutches, in and out of surgery, while they bolted together his leg “with rods and plates and screws”.
“To say then that I was going to be here playing, and talking to you, it would have been very unlikely.” He did not wake up that first day in hospital with the idea of making it back here. Back then it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to amputate his leg. Instead Woods has gone about the recovery one step at a time. Like Nicklaus he is doing what he needs to do day-by-day to get in a position where he can win the Masters one more time. He is convinced he can do it, too. And because he is Tiger Woods, who is going to say he can’t?
He still does not really have all that much mobility and does not expect to ever again; and he is in pain “each and every day”. But here he is anyway. “It’s a matter of what my body’s able to do the next day, and the recovery. That’s the hard part,” Woods explained.
“It gets agonising because simple things that I would normally just do now take a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there to prep and then wind down.” The idea of just walking the course for four days in a row is daunting. “It’s up to me to endure all the pain” and his medical team to help him manage the rehab. “How I am going to get all the swelling out and recover for the next day.”
“But I feel like I can still do it and I feel like I still have the hands to do it; the body’s moving good enough.” This is a man who won the 2008 US Open while he was carrying two stress fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament, who won the 2019 Masters two years after he had undergone spinal fusion surgery.
“I’ve been in worse situations and played and won tournaments. Now I haven’t been in situations like this where I’ve had to endure what I’m going to try and endure, that’s a different challenge. But my back surgeries and all the stuff I’ve had to play through before, those are all things I can draw upon where I was successful.”
Woods once said that his win here in 2019 felt like his Everest and that, having climbed it once, he did not feel the need to do it again. The injuries gave him a mountain to climb and a new reason to try and do it, too.
Woods did not just lose control of his car that night; he lost control of his career, too, and for a time the question of whether he was ever going to be able to play, to compete, to win, again, was taken out of his hands. Which would be hard for anyone but must have been utterly intolerable for a man who has spent his whole life defying the limits other people have tried to put on him.
“I don’t know how many more years I can still do this,” he said at one point. But while he still can, he still will, however much it hurts.
