A blonde on one arm, a trophy in the other and just like that, all is right in Tiger Woods’ world again.
It was just another day at the office Monday for Woods, like nothing had happened over the past half decade.
He cruised into Bay Hill Golf and Country Club for the weather-delayed final round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational with a two-shot lead, never wavered and left with a two-shot win, his third in four stroke-play starts this season.
Presumably his new girlfriend, celebrity skier Lindsey Vonn, will gush her congratulations via Facebook. So wholesome. So different.
Remember when Tiger was ranked 58th in the world? Remember when there was serious discussion about if he’d ever win again, let alone win another major?
Remember when the best player in the game was Martin Kaymer? Or Lee Westwood? How about Luke Donald? And then came Rory McIlroy. Young Rory was going to be the next Tiger, holding the world by the tail.
Forget all of that. Forget the trysts with the waitress and voicemail recording of a panicked Woods begging mistress Jamie Grubbs to take his number off her phone, as “my wife may be calling you.” Forget the divorce and rehab stint where he was treated for sex addiction. Forget the multiple surgeries on his left knee and the ruptured Achilles tendon and the inflammation in his neck. Forget the 30 months he went between wins and the nearly five years he’s gone without a major championship victory.
Woods has put it all in the rearview. He’s playing the best golf of his post-meltdown life again.
Good for him, but what’s in it for us?
For us there’s something reassuring about seeing Woods in red, once again providing the ends to the stories we know by heart. In the interim, golf has just been golf — a difficult game that attracts athletes who have the diligence of a piano prodigy and roughly the same charisma.
Without Woods and his slaying of mythic dragons, battling back pretenders with a dismissive scowl and a timely birdie putt, golf is a sport that gets the attention of non-golfers for a few dozy summer Sunday afternoons on the couch.
Woods takes golf and makes it about transcending limits. When he’s playing well it’s a discussion about where he stands in relation to the greats of the game. His win at Bay Hill tied him with Sam Snead as the only golfers to have won the same PGA Tour event eight times. More significantly it was Woods’ 77th career victory. If he can maintain some version of the level he’s at now he might break Snead’s all-time record of 82 wins at some point in the next 12 months.
And if Woods keeps playing at that level, it inspires the best discussions of all: where he stands among the all-time greats in sports and indeed among the all-time greats at anything.
That’s when it’s fun.
The win Monday earned him the No. 1 ranking for the first time since Westwood took over the top-ranking on Halloween of 2010. There have been four golfers not named Woods to hold the top spot since. All of them may as well have been wearing masks, because the best golfer in the world has never been one of them.
It’s always been Woods. It was only a matter of if his health and personal life could get sorted out enough to allow his mind to focus on the new, less physically stressful swing that Sean Foley was helping him learn.
That time is now.
“It was a byproduct of hard work and patience and getting back to winning golf tournaments,” he said in his typically bland greenside interview.
We even missed those.
The product of all that patience and hard work and good health is an athlete who can do what he wants, when he needs to do it most.
While his list of majors includes blowouts like his epic 15-shot win at the US Open in 2000, more telling were moments like him willing in birdie putts on the 17th and 18th holes to force a playoff — which he won — at the PGA Championship that same summer; or his punch-counter-punch exchange with Rocco Mediate during the 2008 US Open — which Woods won in a Monday playoff — made all the more dramatic because he was doing it on a broken leg and a knee that would require reconstructive surgery that kept him out of the game for eight months.
That decade, from 1999 to 2008 — give or take — marked golf played better than it ever has. It made the fall that followed more dramatic. It has made the climb to some version of that form so much more arduous.
Woods flashed some of that old self on the 12th hole Monday when his playing partner, Rickie Fowler, not content to throw Woods off with a pair of bright orange pants, drilled a birdie putt to pull within two shots. Woods responded by rolling in his own birdie to answer the challenge.
Woods wasn’t infallible. He rarely is, even at his best. But he’s a grinder disguised as a maestro, and so he wears opponents down. On the 15th and 16th holes Woods opened the door ever so slightly with a loose approach to the green leading to a bogey and a drive that found a fairway bunker on the 16th. Fowler had his chance and went bogey-triple while Woods dropped just a shot.
It’s the secret Woods displays over and over again that no else quite seems to grasp: as much as the lore of golf is about late charges and dramatic shots, most tournaments don’t go to the winner as much as they go to the golfer who didn’t lose them.
Woods, having lost so much in the past five years, appears to be done with that. He’s back to winning. The Masters looms in two weeks’ time and Woods hasn’t been this well positioned to renew his quest for Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major championships since he was still married to Elin Nordegren.
Can Tiger be what he was? It’s an almost impossible order given the weight of age and injuries and life itself, Lindsey Vonn’s life-affirming qualities notwithstanding.
Woods has been the best ever before and may yet again. But at the moment he’s No.1 — the best for now — which is pretty damn good.