Tiger Woods is probably going to be just fine

Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images

A week after having to drop out of The Northern Trust with an oblique injury, Tiger Woods dropped his best round of the summer at the BMW Championship. Relax. Maybe it’s time to understand that modern golf promotes inconsistency.

Maybe it’s just, maybe it’s not, but golf loves to make something of nothing perhaps as much or more than any other. We debate what a Joel Dahmen second-place finish means for the growth of the game, mower lengths, reactions, body language, whatever. Succeeding in the five-hour pressure cooker of tournament golf requires some sort of mental defect. Perhaps that’s a prerequisite for just, uh, existing in the sport’s orbit too.

The public perception, hype, and hope of Tiger Woods’ 2019 season’s been a rollercoaster. It’s been catharsis, dismissiveness, worry, concern, and dismissal somehow all rolled into a six-month period. Just consider where we’ve been through the course of this year alone. We’ve thought he was an good-to-above-average player not quite capable of winning The Masters, until he did, at which point the pursuit of Jack was back on. But what to make about that five second video clip of him walking gingerly? Is he done again? Maybe that’s why he’s taken too much time off like before the PGA. And he just can’t play in colder weather like at Pebble and the Open. Or maybe he’s still hurt, or hurt again.

Take a deep breath. Calm down. Breathe easy. He’s fine. Probably.

After having to withdraw last week from The Northern Trust following a first round 75, Tiger Woods bounced back with a third-round 67 at the BMW Championship on Saturday. It’s his best tournament round since the final round of The Memorial where he finished T-9 in June — but it’s perhaps another couple factor makes it even more impressive. Playing right alongside Dustin Johnson, Big Cat was completely mistake-free on Saturday, not carding a single bogey for the duration of the round. Woods routinely drilled it past his normally longer, younger playing partner for a nice chunk of the round. Oh, and no — there was no wincing, no grimacing, no tender-looking steps. In a highlighter yellow shirt that would be hard to miss from space, Tiger looked every bit of the guy we saw win a major championship win a major just a few months ago.

And if it weren’t for a few small mistakes earlier in the week, we might be talking about Tiger having a real chance to win this event at a Medinah course where he’s all too familiar come tomorrow.

“Basically the only difference between today and the last couple of days was that I was able to cleanup the card,” Woods said in the post-round gaggle. “I didn’t have any stupid mistakes where I made bogey from bad spots or from easy spots. I converted a nice up and down on 5. I did the little things — and that was able to keep the momentum going with putts going in here and there.”

This is, as we’ve written before, the new reality for Tiger — and for golf. There’s going to be weeks he looks terrible and decrepit, and there’s going to be weeks he looks like a world-beater. For most of Saturday, he looked like the latter. The misses were few and far between, and those that came were followed by at least mild brilliance. A particular shot from 14th sticks out — a right-to-left second shot from a crowd in the left rough that left you audibly laughing to yourself that there was real doubt about this man’s health entering the week.

But as much as we get worked up about Tiger’s good weeks and bad, it’s a point he made after the round that puts his own ups and downs in perspective — such is the case for many others, too. Blame it on a number of factors, whether it be a condensed schedule, equipment, today’s practice habits, the economic incentives, players with more broad interests, whatever. Inconsistency — or at least a movement to be more selective about when players are going to lock in and grind it out — tends to be the case for everyone on today’s Tour. See, uh, Kopeka, Brooks.

“When I came out on Tour and before me, especially, there’s a lot of 1-irons off the tee just to kind of get it in play. Now, you just pull out driver, bomb it down there, and you’re looking for three to four good weeks a year. That’s how you play. It’s not the consistency, it’s not about making a bunch of cuts. It’s about having three, four good weeks a year. That’s the difference — and guys today understand that.”

This is New Tiger. There’s going to be weeks he looks decrepit, old, broken, and shitty. Heck, in cooler temperatures, that may be the case more often than not. But working ourselves into a panic and leaving him for dead after each wince, or small injury, or rough week is unnecessary. Tiger’s going to manage his workload differently than before, he’s going to focus more on recovery and rest than ever before, and he’s going to focus on swinging the golf club in a way that won’t hurt him more than ever before. That’s going to lead to some 75s at Liberty National, and it’s going to lead to 67s at Medinah.

This is golf. It is, by nature, a fickle game. In a given full field PGA Tour event, you’re competing against a 155 other individuals in a competition where there’s only one winner. Volatility is expected. Missed cuts are expected. Results that seem out-of-nowhere happen routinely.

Sure, Tiger was that exception for years, but it’s unrealistic for us to continue to expect that sort of standard — even when he’s playing at a Top 10 level worldwide. Proclaiming he had a chance to catch Jack after one Masters win was probably hyperbolic. Leaving him for dead after a forgettable Open Championship early exit and a WD at The Northern Trust probably was too. Let’s al normalize all this somewhere in the middle.

As long as Tiger’s playing, it’s natural — he’s always going to be the lead story, the second headline, and perhaps the third. We’re going to get excited when the red numbers light up, we’re going to panic when the inflammation flares up. A simple early Saturday morning walk with him hours before the leaders, when the rest of Medinah was soggy and barren, was evidence of such. It’s still rock-concert golf even on a sleepy mid-morning after the major season’s ended and half the course is hungover from Friday night.

But for now, calm down. Relax. If Saturday’s returns are predictive, things are going to be fine.