Tiger Woods, your winner of the 2018 Tour Championship, is back

Tiger Woods finishes the greatest comeback season in the history of golf with his first win in more than five years.

About 10 months ago, Tiger Woods started this comeback year, now maybe the greatest in the history of the sport, with this howitzer of a line about his kids.

“I never thought my kids have understood what I’ve been able to do in the game because they always think I’m the ‘YouTube’ golfer,” Woods said. “They’ve never seen me in action. Most of the stuff they’ve seen has been on highlight packages. I want them to see what I’ve been able to do my entire career. I don’t know how long I’m going to be playing, but I want them to come to a few events. I want them to feel it. I want them to understand it a little bit more.”

Tiger’s kids got that show all year, from early-season events on the Florida swing to major championships and throughout these FedExCup Playoffs. Tiger hit the shots that you never thought you would see again. He ignited crowds from sleepy regular season events to major championships on both sides of the Atlantic. There was power and shotmaking and a strut that a generation of kids had previously only seen on YouTube.

The one thing he didn’t show them was a win. He didn’t need to for them to understand what he was once able to do. The win could become a capstone achievement, but the comeback was already a success in demonstrating to his kids and the world that he could still play the game the way he once did.

The one thing you cannot get from YouTube, however, is the way Tiger slowly choked out so many of the best fields at the biggest golf tournaments in the world for an entire career. There are many dramatic shots in Tiger’s library. Those highlights are all out there. But perhaps the signature of his career is how dominated tournaments to make Sundays almost a formality. That sense of inevitability cannot be conveyed through a highlight video.

We got that this weekend. There was the brilliance of Saturday, when Tiger posted six birdies in his first seven holes that sparked the usual delirium that comes with a Tiger charge. And then there was Sunday, when Tiger just strolled around East Lake and watched the rest of the field slowly bleed out while he stayed a comfortable arm’s length away on the leaderboard. From arriving in the parking lot with his cut-off T-shirt, to the birdie at the first hole, this thing was over before it started.

While Saturday provided the mania, Sunday was almost boring in the way that so many of Tiger’s wins were drama-free executions. Almost boring, aside from the fact that the player strolling to the win had not done it in 1,876 days and had four back surgeries, a DUI, rehab, and countless personal and golfing embarrassments during those intervening days.

Tiger’s win on Sunday, in the context of his play this season, should not come as a surprise. He’s back to being the best ballstriker in the world, the one thing that he’s been the best at his entire career. He started the week No. 1 in strokes gained approach-the-green and No. 5 on the entire PGA Tour in strokes gained total. His power off the tee is back and after some early-season flexing that he could, in fact, pop it out there with the young bombers he inspired, he throttled it down a bit for more control over this postseason. Maybe he’s not hitting it as far as Rory McIlroy, but almost no one does. Tiger is accepting of that and more than knows how to work his way around the golf course, which he did by a good six shots less than Rory this week.

The biggest inconsistency was the putting. We’ve seen him switch out putters all summer but his Scotty Cameron, the one responsible for 13 of his 14 majors, came back into the bag at the last postseason event. Putting is the one part of your game that can come and go the quickest. Unlike the full swing, which can take months to work back into shape when that goes bad, putting can go hot or cold based on little more than just luck of the day.

This week, Tiger led the field in strokes-gained putting and it was blouses by early Saturday afternoon.

Tiger Woods won a PGA Tour event in the year 2018. A year ago, that was incomprehensible. He was just receiving clearance to hit short chip shots. It seemed unlikely that he’d return to competitive golf. It seemed like pure fantasy he’d be good enough to just make it to the season-ending Tour Championship, where only 30 players get an invite via their season-long success. But he did make it, and then won it.

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Here are your final results from Atlanta:

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