Snead was right to sound a note of caution about the unseen forces that could trip up Woods. But burnout has never been Woods’s problem. A broken-down body has been what has kept him from becoming, by all measures, the greatest golfer the world has ever seen.
As the 2018-19 season wore on, the only physical discomfort that Woods mentioned was a mild oblique strain that caused him to withdraw before the second round from his penultimate start, at the Northern Trust. Only after the fact did Woods acknowledge that his knee had been bothering him since before he claimed his first victory in five years at the 2018 Tour Championship. With that admission, the mystery of his sudden disappearance from leader boards was solved.
After Woods won the Masters in April for his 15th major title, the expectation was that the result would catapult him to great heights. It seemed entirely conceivable that he would clear the five-win bar that he set in 2013. That’s what I thought, anyway, and I was in good company.
Instead, he made only six starts last season after the Masters and his best finish after Augusta was a tie for ninth.
“When he wins the Masters, you think he’s going to win another five majors straightaway,” Adam Scott, the former world No. 1 from Australia, said last month at the Safeway Open in Napa, Calif. “And then right now we don’t know exactly how his health is.”
Woods, who will turn 44 in two months, looked as fit as a player half his age, and his ball-striking and putting called to mind the Woods of lore, whose appearance on the leader board causes angina in his competition.
From Francesco Molinari of Italy, who closed with a 74 at the Masters while grouped with Woods, to Keegan Bradley, who carded a 71 in the third round in Japan while playing alongside him, the Tiger effect would appear to be back in play. Twice in the final two rounds, Woods extended his lead to a Secretariat-like five strokes.
