All of that changed in the dark hours following Thanksgiving dinner in 2009. Woods’ carefully cultivated family-friendly image was subsequently shattered by a parade of bimbos with tales to tell, text messages included. A life’s work was reduced to a series of tawdry headlines on the front page of The New York Post. The greatest golfer of all time spawned the biggest sex scandal of the media age.
Woods, 38, has soldiered on. It is inarguable that he is no longer the player he was pre-scandal. He still has time for a triumphant final act but nothing will bring back the lost years in what should have been the prime of his career. The scandal and its fallout are the root cause of much of what ails Woods today, but it’s easy to forget the freighted events that preceded it.
The knee injury that made possible his myth-making 2008 U.S. Open victory remains the most significant rebellion from a body that has broken under the strain of his relentless drive. Woods was always going to have to make swing changes to protect his knee going forward. Would he have felt the need to reinvent himself so totally with a new coach if the scandal had never happened? Or could he have stayed with Hank Haney and made a few tweaks but fundamentally kept doing what he was doing so well? We’ll never know. At his nadir, Woods latched on to Sean Foley, who turned out to be the wrong man at the wrong time. At a moment when Woods needed simplicity above all else his head was suddenly filled with complicated new ideas.
But Woods has never been defined by his mechanics. After all, he’s won the Masters with three different swings. Early in his career he overwhelmed with power but by the late-aughts he had already dialed back while a new generation of athletes swung away with impunity. No, what separated Woods was mostly metaphysical. On Tour the difference between the good and great putters -- and in Tiger’s case, the great from the best ever -- is confidence, belief, freedom, and an institutional memory of success. In the weeks before Woods’ personal life was torn asunder he suffered two significant on-course setbacks. Y.E. Yang pulled a Buster Douglas and ended an era invincibility by dominating Woods on Sunday at the 2009 PGA Championship. A few weeks later, at the Barclays, Tiger had a short do-or-die putt on the 72nd putt and it wasn’t even close. Whatever vulnerabilities he was feeling were magnified exponentially when the scandal broke.
Selfishness is a common trait among many great golfers; Woods’ had a particularly acute sense of entitlement. It came through in the leaked text messages to his paramours just as it played out in the most pressure-packed golf tournaments. He won because he expected to, because in his mind he was the most deserving. With his celebrated 5 a.m. wakeup alarms, Woods knew he had put in the longest hours on the range, the practice green and the gym, not unlike how Jack Nicklaus used to camp out at Augusta National a full week ahead of the Masters to play a 72-hole tournament against himself long before the first round. With Woods, as with Nicklaus, the tournament was often over before it began.
After he ran over the fire hydrant Tiger had to endure public shaming on an unimaginable public scale. Who he is and how he lives his life were changed in profound ways. The person who toils alone between the ropes now is fundamentally different from the indomitable champion of before. Injuries and swing confusion have become the popular narrative of Woods’s decline, but don’t forget that he won five big-time tournament tournaments in 2013. His long-game may have been more one-dimensional and his short-game less dynamic, but Woods could still summon winning golf. Yet at the tournaments that he wants most and which will ultimately define his legacy -- the major championships -- the post-scandal Woods has looked utterly lost. The deficiencies in his game (inability to draw the driver, a lower ball flight with his irons, less precision with his wedges, more missed short putts) are highlighted in these more extreme conditions. More to the point, so is Woods’ lack of conviction. Winning 19 majors was always his destiny. Then his trajectory was irrevocably altered, and Tiger is still struggling to adjust. So are all of us accustomed to his former ruthless efficiency at winning.
Woods has displayed an admirable dignity in moving forward with his life after his public humiliations. He is never more authentic than when discussing his kids and the challenges of being a single dad. Woods remains a committed philanthropist and his many excellent works in the service of others offer a roadmap to his post-golf life. He may yet win another major championship, or even two or three. If and when the first one comes, there will be much talk about redemption. But whatever Woods does from here won’t change the past. For 12 years he played the most exciting and dominant golf in the history of the game. Five years ago he lost control of his life, and nothing has been the same since.
