The Comeback, No 9: Tiger’s remarkable Masters win and the pain that preceded it

The Comeback, No 9: Tiger’s remarkable Masters win and the pain that preceded it

Brittany Ghiroli
Aug 31, 2020

Editor’s note: This story is part of a series counting down the 40 greatest comebacks in sports.

He went to England looking for answers. Did you know that? When the pain was unrelenting and the options were running out, Tiger Woods would do anything to make it stop.

The journey overseas in early 2017 offered a glimmer of hope. They all did at some point. It’s one of the most fascinating little-known details on the cutting-room floor of “Tiger Woods: Reborn,” an eight-minute film directed by Kevin Foley that puts one of the greatest comebacks in sports history into more grandiose light.

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Before he returned home and underwent last-resort spinal fusion later that year, Woods was an aging athlete with three back surgeries that each had failed to accomplish the ultimate goal: to alleviate never-ending nerve pain. Forget golf. Woods was a man in his 40s so debilitated it would leave him helpless, belly up on his lawn or writhing in pain on the couch. At a news conference in 2016, Woods acknowledged for the first time his storied career might be over. Forget golf. How about just being able to live a normal life, one that didn’t include shooting pain down his legs, the kind of searing discomfort that alters your mood and becomes so bad you swear you can taste it? I’m done, he had reportedly whispered to colleagues years before, after he had gone months without even thinking about picking up a club. Forget golf. He couldn’t play with his kids, sleep or even sit down.

Forget golf. Except Woods couldn’t. The most dominant player of his era and arguably the greatest golfer ever, a player who is tied for first in career PGA Tour victories and is second in major championships, wasn’t ready to be done. England didn’t have the answers, so Woods took the only other remaining option.

“He initially thought (lumbar fusion surgery) would stop the pain, but never allow him to rotate ever and hit a golf shot,” says Foley, who spent six hours with Woods filming the day after the Super Bowl for the video that was released last month. “He was at the point (before surgery) where he ran out of options. That was the biggest thing we wanted to do, to present his story in a way he never did.”

Foley’s objective was to tell the before and after of the surgery, to humanize a man considered more myth than mortal.

You thought you knew it all about Woods’ meteoric rise and fall, the spinal fusion that saved him and the relentless rehab that forced him to awaken at 3 a.m. on the Sunday in April 2019 he did the unthinkable at Augusta National Golf Club. Woods winning his fifth green jacket — his first in 14 years and his first major title since 2008 — was already one of the most remarkable comebacks in all of sports, one that culminated with his throwing his hat in the air and letting the world in, celebrating like he never had after each of his first 14 major championships. Behind the 18th green, Woods grabbed his two children, squeezed his mother and let out a roar with his eyes shut and mouth stretched wide, the kind of scream that only comes from years of pent-up pain and frustration. You thought you knew what he had been through, had a glimpse of Woods’ perseverance through eight knee and back operations. Truthfully, we didn’t have a clue.

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Time and again we had seen the hand on his back, the gingerly way in which Woods would retrieve his ball out of the hole. The reduced schedule, nine practice holes instead of 18. They were clues, but they didn’t speak to the depth of the pain. Nothing did, until Woods told us.

“It felt like I was playing the game bloody knuckles,” Woods says on the video of swinging a club before his spinal fusion surgery in April 2017. “The uncomfortableness of when you hit your funny bone, how much that hurts.”

Woods stares almost defiantly into the camera, rings around his eyes, fine lines from a life lived on both ends of the mountain.

“Now do that 1,000 times per day and see what that feels like.”

Much has been made of the surgery and the 18 months before that when he didn’t play in a single major, missing eight events he cherishes the most. What few knew was how long he had lived in crippling condition, how much the pain had leaked into every facet of his life. When Foley asked Woods to go back to his lowest days, starting in 2013, Woods’ eyes grew dark and he began to limp.

“That’s what his physical memories of that pain were,” Foley says. “I just said, ‘I want to put you back in that mental space where your life was horizontal and there wasn’t much hope of you playing again. I want you to be totally yourself.’ Tiger was all-in. This wasn’t him on the driving (range) in a Nike ad. This was him sharing his darkest days, and I was blown away by it.”

The excruciating pain from a swing brought Woods to his knees at the 2013 Barclays. (Chris Condon / PGA Tour)

Foley had done his research, aware of the layers surrounding Woods and the golfer’s ability to shut down anything personal. The project was made possible because Woods signed on as a partner with Centinel Spine, eliminating any HIPAA issues, meaning he wanted to do it. But Foley — whose brother, Sean, had worked previously as Woods’ swing coach — was prepared to push one of the most famous athletes on Earth. He kept Woods’ quote about sharing “his own truth” handy and read it back to him at the start of the day. The truth is, he didn’t have to.

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Woods, the man who bought a yacht and appropriately named it “Privacy,” was finally OK pulling back the curtain. He shared personal stories, telling us that every second in pain felt like days, that the lowest months of his life dragged and morphed to become “more like 30 years.” A man who reportedly had once been obsessed with Navy SEAL training was showing weakness and admitting how broken he was.

“A day in the life would be very easy: I wouldn’t move,” Woods says in the video, his back often to the camera as his voice narrates the pain. “It was hard to try and wrap my head around it. Can I get up to the refrigerator or am I not really that thirsty?”

Here is one of the greatest athletes of our lifetime weighing the merits of getting a drink. Here is Woods again, on that overcast Sunday, celebrating his one-shot victory in the 83rd Masters. He is lifting his son, Charlie, into his arms, twisting and turning to fist-bump and high-five caddies and tournament officials.

How can this not be a comeback for the ages, a feat of modern medicine and unparalleled resolve? For a sport built on rotation and torque, how can Woods’ surgery not forever change the way fusions — long though to be a career-ender — are viewed?

“You can’t really fathom what he has put his body through over the last five to 10 years, with all the surgeries, the rehabs, the pain pills,” LPGA player Marina Alex says. “It’s tough to imagine how exhausting that is.” Alex has had back pain. Every golfer has. Fusion surgery had long been considered a career-ender in golf. But what often defines the greats is they refuse to play by the rest of our rules.

“Everyone is dedicated and putting in 100 percent as a pro, but then you have a guy like Tiger, that’s just insane,” Alex says. “He is willing to do absolutely anything to be great.”

Yes, he had won the previous fall at the Tour Championship. And who can forget the image of the sea of fans following him down the 18th fairway at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta? But this was different. When Woods clinched his 15th major championship, his kids — Charlie and daughter Sam — undoubtedly appreciated it more than most. They were there to witness their father’s utter joy after having seen golf cause him almost nothing but pain. They knew the extent of it when the rest of us didn’t.

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“They’d see me swing a club and end up on the ground,” Woods said on the day he ended an 11-year major championship drought, his voice hoarse and smile contagious.  “Now we’re giving them some different memories.”

Tiger Woods: Reborn. And we all got to witness it.

“It’s the greatest comeback in sports of all time,” says longtime Golf Channel reporter Steve Sands, who has covered Woods for 20 years and was on the receiving end of an emotional post-round interview.

It was Sands — given the nickname “Sandsie” by Woods — who remembers watching Woods walk up the 18th fairway at Augusta National with a two-shot lead, fans encircling the hole to catch a glimpse. It was much more than “just golf loud,” louder than the roars we have come to expect during the final round of the Masters. By the time Sands raced to the airport to catch his plane, his phone was flooded with hundreds of text messages. It was much the same on Twitter and other social media, some saying they missed flights to watch Woods seal the win.

“I remember thinking, How many people in sports can move people that much? To reach out in a moment like that?” Sands says. “Tiger is unlike anybody else in golf. He draws in everyone. He doesn’t just move the needle, he is the needle.”

Woods’ win defied everything we knew, about the sport, about the surgery, about his indomitable spirit and determination. The only story in its stratosphere is Ben Hogan coming back to win six majors after nearly dying when his car was crushed by a bus in 1949. There is something about Woods’ pain that made him likable again. Almost none of us know what it’s like to be on top of the world the way Woods was, but we’re all well-versed in suffering. In defeat. In being counted out and cast aside.

“He’s way more human now,” Foley says. “I think everything that has happened to him and his body has given him a greater sense of appreciation for his life. And I felt like he was going to be really open to showing that.”

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Woods is no stranger to the camera. He has seen every moment of the past 25 years, all the highs and lows, become headlines. He has appeared in countless commercials, flashing that million-dollar grin. But the story of his rebirth didn’t start on a driving range. It began on the ground: limping, fighting, believing.

“Just be yourself,” Foley told Woods, one of his sports heroes, during shooting. Woods didn’t have to be reminded.

“You got the sense that spiritually, emotionally, physically, it was the hardest thing he ever had to go through,” Foley says.

The victory was special for Woods because he got to experience it with his kids. (Rob Schumacher / USA Today)

This was the comeback before the comeback, before Woods’ tap-in bogey putt dropped in the hole and made him a major champion at 43 and us witnesses to one of sport’s greatest achievements. Almost two years to the day before Woods won the Masters, he was in surgery with Dr. Richard G. Guyer. “Stand up,” he was told when the procedure, which is called anterior lumbar inner-body fusion, was over.

Woods was in disbelief. “You kidding me?” he says in the video, reminding Guyer he had just been cut open. Eventually, amazingly, Woods gingerly gets up. The pain, the constant he lived with for so long, was gone.

He could walk, he could move, he could be a dad again. Maybe that’s what makes this comeback so special. Not that Woods spent months going through rigorous rehab and retooling his swing, but that he was finally at peace. He was playing golf because he loved it, competing because he doesn’t know how to stop. Woods had realized everything post-surgery would be a bonus, including that day in Augusta.

“That’s why you see the crowd react the way they do to him,” Foley says. “You can’t script that stuff; it’s just people responding and people saying thank you. You never had the sense it was that dark, it was that hard for him. He carried it in for so long.”

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“Everyone knows about the wins and the majors, and that’s cool. But I think there’s so much inspiration you can take beyond that.”

There have been greater wins and more impressive all-around performances. But what Woods did in returning, in winning at Augusta National, showed us something bigger: the resolve of the human spirit.

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Brittany Ghiroli

Brittany Ghiroli is a senior writer for The Athletic covering MLB. She spent two years on the Washington Nationals beat for The Athletic and, before that, a decade with MLB.com, including nine years on the Orioles beat and brief stints in Tampa Bay (’08) and New York (’09). She was Baltimore Magazine’s “Best Reporter” in 2014 and D.C. Sportswriter of the Year in 2019. She’s a proud Michigan State graduate. Follow Brittany on Twitter @Britt_Ghiroli