Tiger's Athletic Twilight Has Happened Before

By: Rob Duca


It's sad when a great athlete faces his athletic mortality. In too many cases he is the last person to know. He hangs on, waiting for that resurgence, often traveling from team to team, unwilling to let go and continuing to believe that what once came so naturally will return once again.

We think of Brett Favre as a shadow of himself in his final year with the New York Jets. If you're old enough, you remember Johnny Unitas in a San Diego Chargers' uniform and Joe Namath ending his career with the Los Angeles Rams. Or Michael Jordan with the Washington Wizards and Bobby Orr with the Chicago Black Hawks. Of course, the poster boy for staying on too long is the once-graceful Willie Mays stumbling around in centerfield with the New York Mets at the 1973 World Series.

As a new PGA Tour season heads towards the Masters, I wonder if Tiger Woods is becoming another example of an elite athlete hanging around too long. Is the inevitable decline now in full swing thanks to a combination of age, injuries and swing changes? Or can Woods become dominant again? Actually, forget dominant; can he win another major championship?

After coming off back surgery that restricted him to seven starts and barely more than $100,000 in earnings last season, he returned in early December to a Silly Season event called the Hero World Challenge, which benefits his eponymous foundation. Woods finished in dead last as he flubbed chip shots like a 20-handicapper.

He didn't play in this weekend's Arnold Palmer Invitational, where he's an eight-time winner, and hasn't been seen in competition since withdrawing from the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in early February. It remains to be seen if he'll play in next month's Masters at Augusta National, where he's won four times.

Our expectations for Woods have taken the sort of tumble that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. When he teed it up at the Waste Management Open in Phoenix during Super Bowl week - the first time he included the event on his schedule in 14 years - an ESPN headline blared "Making the Cut Would be Big for Tiger."

Turned out they were right. Making the cut would have been monumental. Instead, Woods shot 82 in the second round and wasn't close to playing on the weekend. It was shocking. He hit balls into the water, skulled chip shots across greens, and looked like someone who was totally, utterly lost.

Woods is 39, with a body that's more like 59. He has a bad back, bad knees, a wayward driver and a shaky putter, and the young guns on tour no longer fear him. The Rory McIlroys and Jordan Spieths respect what Woods has accomplished, but they weren't there to witness it. When Woods produced his otherworldly 2000 season, for example, McIlroy was 12 and Spieth was 7. What they've witnessed in recent years is a player who can't keep the ball in the fairway, can't make crucial putts and can't qualify for the weekend.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American life. But there are in golf, where players once thought to be finished rose from the ashes and produced unexpected victories. If Tiger requires inspiration he need only look at the man he's been chasing his entire life - Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear was 46 when he arrived at August National for the 1986 Masters. He had won only two tournaments, none a major, in 99 starts over the previous five years. A story in a local newspaper that week summed up his chances at the Masters by writing that Nicklaus was "done, washed up, through."

"I kept thinking all week, 'Through, washed up, huh?' " Nicklaus said later. "I sizzled for a while. But then I said to myself, 'I'm not going to quit now, playing the way I'm playing. I've played too well, too long to let a shorter period of bad golf be my last.' "

Nicklaus's historic triumph that week was his final major and the most memorable win of his wonderful career. For Woods, it could serve as a template.

So yes, it's too early to write off Woods as a major factor in golf. He has been too good for too long and, if healthy, he's still plenty young enough to produce more magic. Whether it will be enough to win his first major in seven years remains to be seen.

Whether he still has a realistic chance to win four more majors and catch Nicklaus's record of 18 seems unlikely. But it feels like 2015 will provide our answer.

Rob Duca is an award-winning sports columnist who wrote for the Cape Cod Times for 25 years, covering golf, the Boston Red Sox, the Boston Celtics and the Boston Bruins. He is now managing editor of New England Golf & Leisure magazine and has written for a variety of other publications, including Sports Illustrated, the Boston Globe, Yankee magazine and Cape Cod Life.