Chapter 78

TOUR Championship

East Lake Golf Club

Atlanta, Georgia

September 20–23, 2018

It’s happening. Everything’s coming true.

“We got to be there,” Ethan Cimma says to his grandfather.

From their home in Kentucky, the two Tiger Woods fans have been following their favorite player’s progress all season, his first full slate on the PGA Tour since 2013, when he won five events and was named PGA Tour Player of the Year.

It’s been impossible to look away. “I got a second chance on life,” Tiger posted to his website in late March about the “last resort” spinal fusion surgery he underwent the previous spring. “I am a walking miracle.”

“I am loving life now,” Tiger told reporters at the Hero World Challenge late last year. “I’ve come out the other side and I feel fantastic. A lot of friends have helped me,” he said, acknowledging that “It’s just hard to imagine that I was living the way I was living with my foot not working, my leg not working, and then the hours of not being able to sleep because of the pain.” The “neatest thing” is that he’s “able to get out of bed and I can grab a club and not use it as a crutch,” Tiger said. “Now I’m able to take a swing. That’s so exciting; you have no idea how exciting that is, and I’m just so thankful that I’ve had this procedure and gotten to this point.”

At the lead-up to the Hero World Challenge, Tiger enjoyed showing off a bit for Sam and Charlie.

“How do you see that golf ball?” Sam asked her dad as he hit balls hundreds of yards away.

“It’s only going about 320,” Tiger told her, later admitting he was “just being a complete smartass about it” since she “just thought it was so cool I was hitting it where she couldn’t see it.” Charlie was also impressed: Tiger says his son “wants to compete, he wants to play with me, those are things that are special.”

Could he ever return to the level of that legend on YouTube?

“That’s going to be hard,” he said with a knowing grin. “I mean, I was pretty good.”

He’s certainly on an upward trajectory. Following a thirty-second-place finish at the Masters and a missed cut at the U.S. Open, he finished tied for sixth at the British Open and in the runner-up spot at the PGA Championship. The TOUR Championship is the final event of a season he began at number 1,199 on the Official World Golf Ranking and ended at number 21, earning the right to compete today in a field of thirty that contains eighteen of the top twenty PGA golfers.

Tiger shoots three sizzling rounds—65-68-65—birdieing six of the first seven holes on Saturday. “You play a lot like that golfer Tiger Woods,” NBC’s on-course reporter, Roger Maltbie, tells Tiger, who holds a three-stroke lead going into the final round on Sunday.

As the Tiger faithful well know, he’s a perfect 23–0 when starting a fourth round with a lead this size or greater. His record is unmatched.

It’s been 1,877 days, and 268 Sundays, since Tiger won the 2013 WGC–Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone Country Club, in Akron, Ohio. Five years since his last win.

That’s the point when Ethan Cimma turns to his grandfather. “I live in Kentucky, and on Saturday night I’m watching sports recaps and see what Tiger’s doing,” he says. Cimma immediately knows that he and his grandfather need to be present for this moment. “So we got in the car at 5:30 a.m. and head down,” he tells Golf Digest. It’s a seven-hour drive to Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club. They devote another few hours to securing seats in the stands, but “after watching a few holes, I realized I needed to be on No. 18,” says Cimma.

“See, this is the guy I have been telling you about,” parents say to their kids. The excitement has the effect of turning back the clock. “I’m going to be like a little kid out there screaming for him,” one Tiger booster says.

Tiger’s playing partner is Rory McIlroy. The twenty-nine-year-old golfer from Northern Ireland has won four major championships as well as the TOUR Championship in 2016. “It was sort of the first time I’d really been in that position with him,” McIlroy says of sharing the final tee time with Tiger, “who’s such a hero for a lot of us out here.

“You dream of situations like that,” he remarks.

On the front nine, Tiger opens with a birdie followed by eight straight pars, steadily increasing his lead to five strokes. While McIlroy struggles with the frustration of “not being able to conjure up your best stuff when you need it,” Tiger’s competing against Billy Horschel’s number one position on the leaderboard, with a clubhouse target of 9 under.

Even with his own win in jeopardy, Horschel is in awe of the energy that Tiger brings. “There’s always that extra buzz, that extra energy around the course when he’s here.”

Tiger keeps hitting the fairway until he bogeys 15, then 16, diminishing his lead to two strokes. The margin holds on 17. Bogey on 18 will suffice for the win.

Today’s crowd is standing ten to fifteen deep behind the gallery ropes, collectively hoping—praying, even—for redemption. “It’s an American story of a comeback” is how one fan explains the urgent energy. “He’s earning his way back. It feels like the heyday of Tiger Woods out here today.”

“Things were tense,” says NBC reporter Roger Maltbie. “There wasn’t a person that wasn’t pulling for Tiger in that moment. It felt like we were about to watch someone perform open-heart surgery.”

Tiger tees it up on 18 and drives the ball 350 yards.

Chants rise up from the gallery.

“Ti-ger! Ti-ger!”

“U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Ethan Cimma and his grandfather see Tiger coming down the fairway and realize, It’s happening. Everything’s coming true.

In their collective euphoria, thousands suddenly burst through the ropes and form a human wave surging behind Tiger and Rory McIlroy. A Georgia state trooper turns to Maltbie and says, “What are we going to do about these fans?”

“Son,” Maltbie says, laughing, “ain’t no way you getting that puppy back on the porch.” But the chaos is happy, not dangerous. “It was beautiful pandemonium.”

Especially when play is still ongoing.

On the 589-yard par-five 18th, Tiger and McIlroy are both struck by the parallels to one of golf’s greatest moments: JACK IS BACK read the scoreboard at the eightieth U.S. Open, thirty-eight years ago, when Jack Nicklaus won his first victory in two years—his fourth U.S. Open and his sixteenth major championship.

“This is like Jack in ’80 at Baltusrol,” McIlroy says.

“Yeah, I just didn’t have the tight pants and the hair.”

Tiger bunkers his approach.

Whatever you do, he tells himself, don’t blade this thing out of bounds.

He wedges out to around eight feet, missing the birdie putt before tapping in—two strokes ahead of Billy Horschel.

Six million viewers are tuned to NBC, watching as Tiger wins his eightieth PGA tournament.

The crowd explodes, jumping up and down, cheering and screaming for joy.

Rory McIlroy makes his own final putt, then mouths a message that tells the story of the day in three short words: “That was awesome.”

“Tiger Woods has done so much for the sport,” says Maltbie. “That Sunday at East Lake, the way everyone—and I mean everyone—showered him with love, it was the game’s way of finally thanking him.”

Accepting the TOUR Championship trophy, Tiger says, “I just can’t believe I pulled this off.”