Old, sore and unprepared, Tiger Woods is still at Augusta National to win the Masters

He’ll flirt a bit with the idea that he’s fast approaching senior status. Ha, ha, only three years to wait and he’ll be able to use a golf cart. But then, just when you think that the greatest competitor of his generation has found some soft edges, he starts talking Ws again.

First, we need a quick reset here. This time last year no one really knew if Woods would be able to walk four rounds of a golf course. It was less than 14 months since the car crash that nearly claimed his life had inflicted multiple fractures on his right leg. So when he appeared at Augusta, no one was quite sure what to believe. And it was harder, still, to believe it when he then went one under in the first round.

Yup, another fairytale. At least that is how it seemed to everyone apart from the man himself. Asked yesterday (Tuesday) where making the cut last year stood in comparison with his other achievements, his answer started with: “Well, it’s different. I didn’t win the tournament.”

He did concede the point that “to come back and play was a small victory in itself” but then, lest anyone should consider the idea that he’d gone a bit mushy, he said: “Yeah, I still would have liked to have gotten the W, but I didn’t.”

What he has made clear since that crash is that you would only ever catch him playing tournament golf if he believed that he had a chance of winning. Same deal here.

How do his chances this year compare with the last? “I think my game is better than it was last year,” he said. And: “I think my endurance is better.” Opinions from those closest to him corroborate that. On Monday he played a practice round with Rory McIlroy and Freddie Couples and both gave him glowing but considered reports. “He’s got all the shots,” McIlroy said. “If he didn’t have to walk up these hills and have all of that, I’d say he’d be one of the favourites.”

Couples started by saying that he “hit it really, really well” and “I think he’ll be fine” but added a more telling insight. The whole deal with Woods now is different to where it was pre-crash. We know that. Significantly, his narrative has taken an important turn from “will he ever play again?” to “can he actually ever contend again?”

There have been occasions when it looked as though he couldn’t possibly contend any more. The Open at St Andrews last summer was one of those. Anyone swept up in his early exit there, a considerable way from surviving the cut, would have interpreted that to be a swansong.

Yet Woods is not going gently. This is not the goodnight. He still sees shafts of bright hope. And, being Woods, he has planned around it. He has played only one other tournament this year – the Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles – and he made the cut. There, he explained that he would continue competing, but his “limitations” meant that he could expect to play only four events a year – the four majors – and “not too much more than that”. This doesn’t mean that he’ll be turning up rusty and treating the majors like some kind of farewell tour – that’s not Woods, is it? – it means the opposite. It means that the majors are everything and he will devote his all to peaking for them.

This is what Couples was saying when asked if Woods was ready to go: “I think when he tells you, ‘I’m only going to play four events and Augusta is one of them,’ he’s ready to go.”

Thus Woods is reinventing how you approach a major. The concept of arriving match fit, having played a number of events, is one he’s had to kiss goodbye. So he has been attempting to prepare in a different way. First, his physical preparation – meaning the treatment of his right leg – is being managed in order for him to be at his strongest for these four specific weeks of the year.

Then, what is it that he can do to prepare his golf sufficiently? “I’ve been able to recreate a lot of the chip shots at home in my backyard,” he said. Or he uses practice time at Medalist, his home club in Florida, to further mimic the forthcoming challenges, “hitting balls off the side of lies, trying to simulate shots and rehearsing again and again each and every flag location, each and every shot I would hit”.

“I’ve gone through so many different scenarios in my head,” Woods, 47, continued. “You know I don’t sleep very well, so going through it and rummaging through the data bank and how to hit shots from each and every place and rehearsing it; that’s the only way that I can compete here.”

Yes, this a long-shot, long-odds approach, but Augusta National is the place where it has the best chance of coming off. “If there’s any one golf course that I can come back, like I did last year, it’s here,” he said, “just because I know the golf course.”

He remembers his throwback victory here in 2019 and looks at the likes of Couples and Bernhard Langer, who have both contested here in their fifties. Langer finished eighth when he was 56; Couples was sixth at 51.

“They’re older guys who understand how to play this course. It helps. And hopefully it will help me this week.” So here he goes again. Somehow back here again. And, please, never to be written off. “People didn’t think I was a threat in 2019 either,” he said, by way of a parting thought, “but that kind of turned out OK.”

– The Times

Originally published as Old, sore and unprepared, Tiger Woods is still at Augusta National to win the Masters