Tiger Woods is hitting it ‘way by’ Rickie Fowler, according to Rickie Fowler

Just two weeks before Tiger’s return at the Hero World Challenge, details emerge from South Florida that he’s crushing the ball again.

The experiences of the past five years should have conditioned us by now. There’s an irresistible mania around each Tiger Woods comeback. How can there not be? He’s still the most dominant force and the biggest draw in the history of the game. No matter how long he’s been gone or how long it’s been since he won, the golf world, and larger sports world, gets wrapped up in the rumors, reports, and every tiny morsel related to Tiger’s reemergence.

This always generates a fairly significant detachment from reality and sets a ridiculous (and unfair) level of expectations when Tiger does, in fact, play in front of the cameras in a real event.

The latest detail comes from Rickie Fowler and has everyone whipped into a frenzy with two more weeks to go before the Hero World Challenge, Tiger’s own event that he’s committed to playing in the Bahamas. At one of these brand “activations” and equipment unveilings for Cobra, Rickie told Dylan Dethier of Golf.com that Tiger is blasting the ball past him.

Dethier added later that the rumors he’d heard that prompted his question had Tiger “outdriving Fowler in their games by 20-30 yards” at the popular South Florida club where many Tour pros practice.

At 5’9 and 150 pounds, Rickie is one of the smallest players on the PGA Tour, but he can still poke it. He’s not in the very top tier of bombers, but he’s among the longer hitters on Tour, averaging 300.1 yards last year. That was good for 41st among 190 players recorded, and Rickie doesn’t always pull a driver on what many play as driver holes (an approach he put in play at the PGA Championship in August). In 2016, he was 23rd in driving distance, just ahead of noted bombers Justin Thomas and Patrick Rodgers.

So hitting it “way by” Rickie would be the result of some serious power, a quality Tiger obviously possessed more than anyone in the game when he was at his peak.

The last season Tiger had enough rounds to be eligible for official PGA Tour driving stats was 2013, and he averaged 293.1 yards and was 49th during a five-win Player of the Year campaign. There have been increases in distances over the past five years so Tiger may be hitting it farther with new advanced equipment and balls compared to 2013, but that 2013 mark of 293.1 would have put him 92nd on the PGA Tour in driving distance last year. Driving distance is also an imperfect stat! So these are a lot of numbers to give just a tiny bit of context about a Rickie claim that has people jumping to wild conclusions.

Medalist is also the South Florida golf club that’s been the origin of many of the notorious Tiger comeback details that didn’t exactly foretell a Tiger return to dominance, or even competitiveness. There was the infamous report that Tiger shot a “worst ball 66” at Medalist when he was off trying to cure those chipping yips that wrecked his start to the 2015 season. He did come back and play fairly well at the Masters after that report but tanked the rest of the summer. There was also that 2016 Jesper Parnevik anecdote about how Tiger was “flushing everything” at Medalist. A week after the release of that Parnevik anecdote, Tiger backed out of a planned return at the 2016 Safeway Open (h/t Eamon Lynch for the reminder).

This is not meant as a criticism of Tiger. He can’t control everything semi-informed parties are going to say about his progress. But the stuff that goes public during these comebacks is invariably positive. If Tiger is yipping it or spraying it all over the yard, or looking stiff as he hits drives 250 yards, that’s not going to be proclaimed in public.

The good news is that we will shortly have both hitting shots in front of the cameras and with tracers and lasers measuring every yard.

Can I be hopeful and skeptical based on the way these Tiger comebacks have gone in recent years? Some very smart people whose opinions you should respect think this one is different. He had a different surgery (back fusion as opposed to the multiple prior microdiscectomies) and has approached the entire return, with regularly posted Twitter video updates, differently than the mostly secretive rehabs of the past.

It’s fine to take Fowler at face value here. I’m hopeful and want to believe! We all want Tiger back, smoking drives into the horizon and strutting off the tee box. With two weeks to go before the Hero World Challenge, just be wary of all the catnip that always gets us worked up before the shots start counting.