PART 6 Comeback Chapter 74

The Woods Jupiter

Jupiter, Florida

December 30, 2015

Tiger Woods is turning forty.

It’s been a long six years since his crash—both literal and metaphorical—over Thanksgiving weekend of 2009.

By the spring of 2010, it was clear that the damage he’d done to his marriage was insurmountable; that summer, he and Elin were finalizing settlements and custody arrangements for Sam and Charlie. “All that really matters is I have two beautiful kids, and I’m trying to be the best dad I can possibly be,” Tiger told reporters. “That’s the most important thing of all.”

After he and Elin finalized their divorce, in August of 2010, Tiger moved to the Jupiter Island property they’d bought together in 2006 and built his “dream home”—an island mansion set on a property stretching from the Intracoastal Waterway to the Atlantic Ocean. Jupiter Island (population nine hundred) is an enclave of greater Jupiter (population fifty-five thousand): like Isleworth, it is a mecca for professional athletes. According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly thirty PGA Tour players live nearby, including Ernie Els and LGPA star Michelle Wie, who own homes in the Bear’s Club, the luxury golf community designed by longtime South Florida resident Jack Nicklaus. In 2013, Serena Williams also bought an “extremely private” lot in the club, and Michael Jordan built a 43,000-square-foot home there.

Elin chose to settle thirty minutes away in North Palm Beach, where she purchased a 1.4-acre property with two hundred feet fronting the ocean, and built her own luxurious home.

Tiger had offered Elin Privacy in the divorce, but she declined the 155-foot yacht.

“Money can’t buy happiness,” she told People in 2010 of her reported $100 million settlement. “Or put my family back together.” It took her some time to make peace with their new reality. “It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden—was it a lie?… Initially, I thought we had a chance, and we tried really hard,” she explained, but once it became clear that the trust between them was irrevocably broken, they turned their focus instead to what was best for Sam and Charlie. “I will always have a working parent relationship with Tiger,” Elin declared. “Tiger loves the children, and I want them to have regular and good contact with both of us.”

“We both know the most important things in our lives are our kids,” Tiger says in a 2015 sit-down interview with Lorne Rubenstein for Time magazine ahead of his fortieth birthday, adding, “I wish I would have known that back then.”

He’s tackled explaining to Sam and Charlie why their parents are no longer together. “I’ve taken the initiative with the kids,” Tiger explains, “and told them up front, ‘Guys, the reason why we’re not in the same house, why we don’t live under the same roof, Mommy and Daddy, is because Daddy made some mistakes.’”

He’s even reconciled to not being his children’s favorite sports hero.

While golf has always been Tiger’s number one sport, the junior Woodses have fallen in love with another sport: soccer. USA Today goes as far as to call the siblings “soccer-obsessed.”

Recently, golf reporter Steve DiMeglio good-naturedly roasted Tiger while covering the 2015 Hero World Challenge, which benefits the Tiger Woods Foundation. During the tournament, held earlier this month at the Albany Bahamas resort—the “Monaco of the Caribbean,” home to the course where Tiger’s hosting the event—DiMeglio asked Sam and Charlie, “Would you rather be Lionel Messi on the pitch or Tiger Woods on the golf course?”

“Messi,” eight-year-old Sam answered. She smiled and giggled, but like any superfan, she knew the twenty-eight-year-old Argentinian soccer legend’s 2015 stats: fifty-two combined goals for club and country in sixty-one appearances.

“Messi,” six-year-old Charlie chimed in, then added a zinger. “He’s playing.”

“Well,” Tiger said with a laugh, dramatizing his kids’ teasing by hanging his head in mock shame, “he’s right.” Their dad has not been playing.

Tiger shocked the press assembled for the Hero World Challenge (won this year by Bubba Watson—the 2012 and 2014 Masters winner, who in 2013 bought Tiger’s Isleworth house) when he revealed that a “chip shot left-handed” is the only golf ball he’s hit in two months. Tiger hasn’t played in a tournament since August. His primary pastime nowadays is playing video games.

Is this how he wants it? Not at all.

To “really be a part of my kids’ life in the way that I want to be part of it physically, not just as a cheerleader” was the goal he named, with the “first step” being “getting healthy enough to play soccer” with Sam and Charlie.

A Washington Post article, headlined TIGER WOODS’S LATEST PRESS CONFERENCE IS A MASTER CLASS IN SADNESS, quoted Tiger as saying that “the hardest part for me is there’s really nothing I can look forward to, nothing I can build toward.”

In December of 2011, Tiger did win the Hero World Challenge, his first victory since the 2009 Australian Masters. The twenty-six tournaments he’d played in between had yielded only frustrating results—and had led to his parting ways with Steve Williams, his caddie of a dozen years.

In 2012, Tiger managed three PGA Tour wins: the 2012 Arnold Palmer Invitational (his first since the 2009 BMW Championship) followed by the Memorial Tournament and the AT&T National.

In 2013, though injuries prevented him from playing at 100 percent, Tiger had five victories: He led the Tour money list with $8.5 million and was named, for the eleventh time, PGA Tour Player of the Year. It had felt like the start of a real comeback, even though none of the wins was a major.

Then came the dark day on his home practice course when “I hit a flop shot over the bunker, and it just hit the nerve. And I was down.”

He collapsed, unable to get to his feet and unable to call for help without his cell phone. He remained there until his daughter, Sam, came wandering out in search of him.

“Daddy, what are you doing lying on the ground?” Sam asked.

“Sam, thank goodness you’re here,” Tiger said. “Can you go tell the guys inside to try and get the cart out, to help me back up?”

“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.

“My back’s not doing very good.”

“Again?”

“Yes, again, Sam. Can you please go get those guys.”

He’s since had no tournament wins at all in 2014 or 2015, his year-end outlook bleaker than ever while hosting the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas.

“Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t know.”

There’s been one bright spot: Tiger’s new relationship with Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn.

“Something nice that’s happened off the course was meeting Lindsey Vonn,” Tiger said in March of 2013, confirming that he and the beautiful blond skier were dating and noting that he hoped to continue their relationship “privately, as an ordinary couple.”

“Our relationship evolved from a friendship into something more,” said Vonn, “and it has made me very happy.” She deemed Tiger “an amazing father,” adding, “You know, I feel privileged to be along for the ride, and I help as much as I can. They’re great kids—I love ’em.”

Tiger and Vonn, who won gold in women’s downhill skiing at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and has a record-setting number of World Cup victories, are well matched. Even Elin approves.

“You’d think it would be weird,” an unnamed source tells Us Weekly, “but Elin loves Lindsey and they talk all the time. Elin likes that Lindsey is a strong woman.” Another source assures Page Six that Elin “really likes Lindsey and thinks she is a very good influence on Tiger.”

Elin and Tiger get along well as exes, even occasionally double-dating. “As years and years have gone by,” Tiger remarked, “we’re like best friends. It’s fun. She talks to me about her life, I talk to her about my life.”

“My relationship with Tiger is centered around our children and we are doing good—we really are—and I am so happy that is the case,” Elin told People. “I’m happy for Tiger,” she said about Vonn. “I’m happy that there’s somebody else loving my children.”

Following their divorce, Elin focused on finishing her college degree, graduating from Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, on May 10, 2014, with a bachelor of arts in psychology and a 3.96 GPA, though she admits that she could have been a better student in one particular subject. “It was right after I had taken Communications and the Media that I was unexpectedly thrust into the media limelight… and I probably should have taken more notes in that class,” Elin notes wryly.

Tiger and Lindsey Vonn dated for nearly three years before announcing an amicable parting on May 3, 2015. Vonn put the blame on their “incredibly hectic lives that force us to spend a majority of our time apart,” and Tiger likewise stated that “we lead very hectic lives and are both competing in demanding sports. It’s difficult to spend time together.”

As Vonn said, and Elin knows all too well, “Generally, it’s really difficult to date anyone in the public eye.”

The timing is especially unfortunate for Tiger, coinciding with the “just brutal” anniversary of his father’s death. “It’s tough. There’s no doubt. I’m not going to lie about that,” he admits in the days following the breakup. “And on top of that, this time of the year is really, really hard on me.”

The following month, in June of 2015, Tiger played solo in the fourth round of the Memorial Tournament, hosted by his childhood idol, Jack Nicklaus. There was an odd number of players, which led to the stark visual, broadcast on national television, of Tiger walking the Muirfield Village course alone. His tournament score of 302 included a career low point: a third-round 85 that ended with a quadruple bogey on 18.

With a mixture of bravery and defiance, Tiger commented on PGA.com: “When you’re on, no one is going to slow you down. When you’re off, no one is going to pick you up, either. It’s one of those sports that’s tough. Deal with it. This is a lonely sport.”

That feeling stalked him all season long as he missed the cut in three of four 2015 majors and finished the PGA season at 292 on the Official World Golf Ranking.

The reaction on tour was a bitter cocktail of disappointment, astonishment, and sympathy. “It’s hard to watch the greatest player of this generation be a middle of the pack hack,” said former PGA pro turned ESPN golf analyst Paul Azinger after a British Open in which Tiger himself was “a little angered” by his bogey-ridden play.

Azinger, who’d played with Tiger in the second round of his historic 1997 Masters win, voiced the inescapable question: “Who are you and what have you done with Tiger Woods?”

Tiger, a lifelong fan of dressing up for Halloween, had the answer. He chose a self-deprecating “costume,” telling his friend Notah Begay III: “I’m going as a golfer formerly known as Tiger Woods.”

Tiger did manage to best international soccer superstar Lionel Messi on one count in 2015: becoming a restaurateur.

“Enough with the trophies, it’s time to own restaurants,” CBS Sports declared of Messi’s planned 2016 restaurant opening in Barcelona. Tiger’s restaurant, the Woods Jupiter, a 5,900-square-foot space the Orlando Sentinel called a “swanky new restaurant” with a new American menu and the New Times Broward Palm Beach praised as the “classiest sports bar ever,” welcomed its first guests in August.

It’s at the Woods Jupiter where Tiger now sits for his birthday interview with sportswriter Lorne Rubenstein of Time while holding an ice pack to his aching back. “I don’t need another surgery, period,” Tiger tells Rubenstein. “Seven’s enough. Four knees, three backs, that’s enough.”

The pain has been unmanageable at times. To treat pinched nerves in his back, he underwent two microdiscectomy procedures, one in April of 2014 and another in September of 2015, plus a follow-up neurosurgery six weeks later, on October 28. On days when he is able to practice, he plays the four-hole tournament-level minicourse behind his home.

It’s been a while.

But for now, he’s appreciating what he has more than what he’s lost. He throws himself a party at his restaurant for his fortieth, complete with a private concert by his longtime friend Darius Rucker of Hootie & the Blowfish.

Had a great time celebrating my 40th with family & friends at The Woods Jupiter last night, he tweets out the following morning. Thanks @dariusrucker for a fun show.

Thanks everyone for the wonderful birthday wishes. 40 is cool.