AUGUSTA, Georgia — Tiger Woods just broke Sam Snead’s record for PGA Tour wins — in his own mind, anyway. That’s right, for the first time in his unparalleled career, Woods decided Thursday he’d won something just for showing up.
He has never been so right in his professional life. So if you’re counting at home and signing Woods’ dogma about his absurdly unlikely comeback, that would be Tiger 83, Slammin’ Sammy 82.
After posting a 1-under 71 in the first round of the Masters, Woods was asked if he counted his first start in 17 months – and his first start since his car accident less than 14 months ago – as the equivalent of a win.
“Yes,” he replied.
That response was the biggest upset at the Masters since Trevor Immelman defeated Tiger in 2008.
Woods never defined victory as anything other than a trophy in his hands or a green jacket slung over his shoulders. But 509 days after his last round of competition – at the 2020 Masters delayed by the pandemic – and 408 days after his fall, Woods found the perfect time to make an exception. Why?
“If you had seen what my leg looked like where it is now, the pictures, some of the guys know,” he said. “They saw the pictures and they came to the house and saw it. Seeing where I’ve been, getting from there to here wasn’t an easy task.”
Tiger Woods tees off on the 18th hole on Thursday at Augusta National. Getty Images
Woods faced a possible amputation of his right leg, three weeks in a hospital and three months in a hospital bed, and then a grueling treatment and therapy regimen to rebuild that leg back into a working limb for golf’s most prohibitive walk. “People have no idea how hard it was,” he said.
They had a better idea after watching Woods hobble around this hilly, 7,510-yard ballpark and fight his way from shot to shot during his practice runs Monday and Wednesday. Everyone who saw Tiger, including some of his best friends, agreed that he was batting the ball and the only legitimate question about his presence was whether he could run 72 holes.
The mystery of it all created a sense of great anticipation on the first tee when Woods arrived at 11am in his pink shirt, black pants and black cap. The crowd was eight fans deep on one side of a pedestrian mall and ten fans deep on the other. At 11:04 a.m. a Masters official announced, “Go ahead, please, Tiger Woods.” And then Woods sent his first drive to the right, near the bunker. After landing his approach shot just short of Paydirt, Tiger scolded himself or the ball. “Oh, come on,” he said. It was game on.
He saved par on the first hole by nailing a 10-foot course while a drone buzzed over the green, waving his right hand to acknowledge the explosive roar and setting the tone for a very good, pristine walk. Another member of his group, Joaquin Niemann, said he tried to speak to his caddy “and I couldn’t hear anything he was saying.” The world’s best players attended the world’s most prestigious tournament, but the reality was Tiger the only game in town.
Woods survived a couple of unlucky jumps on the front nine, including a birdie putt on the fifth, which he entered in solemn form when he suddenly spun, inspiring him to back up and turn away while the gallery groaned. Woods waited forever for the green to clear the fairway of the par 5, leaning forward and stretching his arms behind him, interlacing his fingers and arching his back. He then directed an ominous mess out of the hole, turning a birdie chance into a bogey. “Just three bad shots in a row,” Woods said.
But nothing could rain on Tiger’s parade on this sunny day, not even a terrible warm-up session at the shooting range or the sweltering five-hour, twenty-minute pace. He shagged the sixth and 13th holes and erased a bogey on the 14th by sinking a sweet right-to-left birdie-breaker on the 16th, where Woods memorably took control of the tournament in 2019 and won his fifth green jacket. Tiger delivered the most emphatic punch at this hole on Thursday and then raised his putter in the air after retrieving his ball. “The place was electric,” he said.
Guess who did this.
“I did something positive today,” Woods said.
He did one of the damnedest things he’s ever done on a golf course. Just as he promised his medical and training staff, Woods dove “into my own little world” during the round and used the adrenaline as a weapon against his pain.
“My leg,” he said, “it’s going to be difficult for the rest of my life.”
So Woods planned to soak his sore body in a couple of ice baths Thursday night and, in his words, “basically just freeze himself to death” in preparation for Friday. But no matter what goes down the rest of the Masters, Tiger just made a career of it first.
He won without winning. And yes, win #83 might have been bigger than any of his first 82.