Chapter 79

The 83rd Masters

Augusta National Golf Club

Augusta, Georgia

April 9, 2019

Tiger has two dinner invitations in the days before the 2019 Masters.

On Tuesday, April 9, he turns up in his Green Jacket at the Augusta National clubhouse, where Patrick Reed, winner of the 2018 Masters, is hosting this year’s Champions’ Dinner. The golfer, known as Captain America for his devotion to Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup team play, is serving an all-American menu with “prime bone-in cowboy ribeye” as the main course.

Two years ago, Tiger had been in such physical distress that even sitting at the Champions’ Dinner required an injection of pain medication. “I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t lay down without feeling the pain in my back and my leg.” He recalls wondering, Is this how the rest of my life is going to be? “I didn’t have much of a life there for about two years,” he tells the Golf Channel. “I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t go out for dinner because I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t drive a car.”

He confirms that at the 2017 Champions’ Dinner he’d said, “I’m done.” That was then. He recounts his recovery journey since, pointing out that after his spinal fusion surgery he “was able to start to walk again. I was able to participate in life, to be able to be around my kids again, to go to their games, go to their practices, take them to school again.”

Of Sam and Charlie, he says, “The only thing they’ve seen is my struggles and the pain I was going through. Now they just want to go play soccer with me. Man, it’s just such a great feeling.”

Now he’s “on the good side” again, and in two days he’ll play in the eighty-third Masters.

On Wednesday, April 10, the Golf Writers Association of America hosts its forty-seventh annual awards dinner. Tiger swaps his Green Jacket for one in navy blue to receive a prize—but not the same Player of the Year award he’s received eleven times. This year, the seven hundred members of the nonprofit organization announced in January that Tiger Woods is being presented with the Ben Hogan Award, named for the legendary Texas golfer. The award has been presented annually since 1954 to golfers who have overcome physical handicaps or injuries and continue to play.

On February 2, 1949, Hogan had been driving down a road in rural Texas with his wife, Valerie, when their car was struck by a Greyhound bus. Hogan’s instinct to shield Valerie with his body saved both their lives, though his several fractures and life-threatening blood clots were medically regarded as career-ending injuries.

“People have always been telling me what I can’t do,” said Hogan, who helped support his widowed mother and siblings on golf-caddie wages. Doctors underestimated Hogan’s determination to make it through a grueling rehabilitation that left him too weak to swing a club throughout 1949. “I guess I have wanted to show them. That’s been one of my driving forces all my life.”

Prior to the accident, Hogan had won three majors: two PGA Championships (in 1946 and 1948) and the 1948 U.S. Open. Defying predictions that he would never walk again, much less compete as a professional athlete, he entered the 1950 U.S. Open, at Merion Golf Club, in Pennsylvania, and won the event in an eighteen-hole playoff.

Hogan went on to win five additional majors, including two Masters (in 1951 and 1953), two U.S. Opens (also in 1951 and 1953), and one British Open (in 1953), but when asked his favorite, Hogan always cited the “Miracle at Merion” because, he said, “it proved I could still win.”

Tiger and Hogan are two of only five golfers (along with Gary Player, Gene Sarazen, and Jack Nicklaus) to win all four majors. But now, that’s not the only way their names are linked in the minds of sportswriters. Receiving the Hogan Award, Tiger says, “is very special,” knowing “what Mr. Hogan went through and what he did and what he was able to accomplish post-[accident].”

Ahead of his 2018 TOUR Championship win, journalists asked Tiger if a victory to close out that season would “complete one of the greatest comebacks in all of sports.” Tiger deferred to Ben Hogan, but in the lead-up to the 2019 Masters, he’s asked again.

His answer is fundamentally the same: “One of the greatest comebacks in all of sports is the gentleman who won here, Mr. Hogan,” he says. “I mean, he got hit by a bus and came back and won major championships. The pain he had to endure, the things he had to do just to play, the wrapping of the leg, all the hot tubs, and just how hard it was for him to walk, period… One of the greatest comebacks there is and it happens to be in our sport.”

Hogan’s comeback included a 1953 win at the eighty-second British Open at Carnoustie, Scotland. Tiger narrowly missed repeating Hogan’s feat when at the 147th British Open last July, also at Carnoustie, he briefly topped the leaderboard during Sunday’s final round. It was a breathtaking moment for everyone watching; Golf Digest noted the thrill of “the mere sight of Big Cat in Sunday red.”

Also watching at Carnoustie and dressed in their dad’s traditional red and black were Sam, then eleven, and Charlie, then nine. Their presence was the most important aspect of the tournament to Tiger. “I know that they know how much this championship means to me and how much it feels good to be back playing again,” he said. “It’s just so special to have them aware because I’ve won a lot of golf tournaments in my career, but they don’t remember any of them.”

On the Golf Channel, sportswriter Tim Rosaforte reported Tiger telling him, “I want [my kids] to see dad do what he’s done most of his life and make them feel and watch what their father can do.”

It’s a sentiment shared by younger players on the tour as well, many of whom were still kids themselves when forty-three-year-old Tiger turned pro, in 1996.

“Tiger being back in the mix,” said Rory McIlroy, who won the Open four years earlier, in 2014, at age twenty-five, “was great, just to be a part of it and hear the roars.” Seeing Tiger’s name atop the leaderboard made the twenty-four-year-old defending champion, Jordan Spieth, turn to his caddie and remark, “This is what you dream about.”

The dream quickly dissolved on the back nine after a double bogey and a bogey. Tiger ended up in sixth place, three shots back from his Italian partner, Francesco Molinari, who emerged as that year’s winner.

“I had a chance starting that back nine to do something, and I didn’t do it,” Tiger admitted. “I know that it’s going to sting for a little bit here, but given where I was to where I’m at now, I’m blessed.”

Put in perspective, the disappointment is “a teachable moment” for him and his children, who ran up to the 18th green to tightly embrace him. “They gave me some pretty significant hugs there and squeezed.”

“Well, you weren’t going to win,” was the kids’ blunt analysis.

“I know I wasn’t going to win, but that doesn’t stop me from grinding,” he told them. “Sometimes you can’t always see that on TV.” He added, “Hopefully you’re proud of your pops for trying as hard as I did.”

The outstanding outcome of Tiger’s surgery, according to a one prominent spinal surgeon, has been “like winning the lottery.”

Tiger is going to play those odds right through Masters Week.