Chapter 52

TOUR Championship

East Lake Golf Club

Atlanta, Georgia

October 31–November 3, 2002

Phil Mickelson’s getting impatient.

It’s 12:55 p.m. on Halloween, and Tiger and Mickelson are about to tee off in the TOUR Championship, the season-ending contest among the PGA’s top thirty money winners.

The East Lake Golf Club announcer introduces Tiger by naming the five tournaments he’s won in 2002. Mickelson, with two wins, interrupts.

“Alright, alright,” he says, playing the implied “enough already” for a laugh.

His joke lands big. The packed gallery erupts in laughter. So does Tiger. But the lightness doesn’t last.

After the first two rounds, the players are tied at 1 under. In the third, Tiger bogeys 18. Though he finishes the round at 67, he’s angry. Outside the scoring trailer, he kicks a fence post.

The next day, Tiger’s visibly limping on the course. He’s got bigger problems than his run-in with the fence post. His left knee has been bothering him the entire season, to the point where painkillers have become part of his pre-round regimen.

He knows the constant pain is damaging the technique he’s spent his career perfecting. “The more the knee hurt, the more I’d have to make alterations in the swing to try to make solid contact,” he says. “The more alterations I made, the more distance I lost, because I was actually moving away from the ball a lot, slowing down, trying not to make it hurt.”

At the TOUR Championship, Tiger ties for seventh and Mickelson for fifth, well back from the winner, Vijay Singh, and the $900,000 top prize.

An examination of Tiger’s left knee shows inflammation. Treatment with ice and anti-inflammatories isn’t enough. He needs knee surgery. “I’ve been playing in pain most of the year and felt it was time to take care of it,” Tiger says.

On December 12, he checks into the Healthsouth Surgery Center in Park City, Utah, where Mark O’Meara and his longtime swing coach, Hank Haney, both have ski condos. O’Meara accompanies Tiger and waits for him in recovery.

For one hour, Dr. Thomas Rosenberg operates on and around Tiger’s anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) to remove built-up fluid and cysts. It’s Tiger’s second surgery on the left knee; he had an unrelated surgery in 1994 to excise a benign tumor.

“From what I’ve been told, the operation went well,” Tiger later posts on his website, tigerwoods.com.

The reality is more complicated. Tiger’s left ACL, he’s informed, is only around 20 percent intact. He says to Haney, “I’m going to have to change my swing.”

Tiger says that 2002 has been “a tough, tough year, one I don’t want to have to go through again.” The pain in his leg was “brutal,” and he admits that “a lot of times, I didn’t want to go out there and play. I felt nausea in my stomach because the pain was so great. I had it injected numerous times to play.”

The beginning of the 2003 PGA season may be uncertain—“Playing my way into shape is going to take a little time”—but there’s still a lot to celebrate, including his upcoming twenty-seventh birthday, on December 30, followed two days later by his girlfriend Elin’s twenty-third birthday, on New Year’s Day.

“I may not touch a club until after Christmas,” Tiger says. Instead, he’s looking forward to spending some of his holiday visiting Elin’s family in her hometown, Vaxholm, a small municipality north of Stockholm, in Sweden.

“I’ve never seen snow fall in my life,” marvels the California native and Florida resident.