Another December, another Hero World Challenge return for Tiger Woods.
In 2014, Woods played this event (which his company hosts) following an early-2014 back surgery and withdrawal from the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational in August. He missed it in 2015 following two more back surgeries, citing that anything else in his career would be gravy. Last year, he played, and it was encouraging. Then it went badly in January and February, and he ended with another back surgery.
So here we are again after a back fusion earlier in 2017. The same Hero World Challenge, the same skepticism and an older Tiger. And the question I keep hearing is a legitimate one: Why is this time going to be any different?
It's a fair question and the right one. We don't know that it will be different than any of the past attempts at a comeback, but there is a big difference. This past surgery, Woods' fourth on his back, was a last-ditch effort to both give him a better quality of life and help him play professional golf again.
This time, his spine was fused together.
How will that go? Nobody, not even Woods, knows.
"I don't have any pain anymore in my back," Woods said this week. "I have some stiffness, 'like no duh, it's fused.' So I'm learning that, what my body can't do yet and what it can do. Just going to take a little bit of time. The people who have had my procedure of L5-S1, the average age is 58. Me being 41, 17 years younger. Most of the people who have had it ... they were well past their playing days when they had the procedures done. I'm still right in my playing years, and so it's hard for me to ask people what were you experiencing because they weren't going at velocity at that age."
This is true, but the thing you have going for you as a Tiger fan is that you don't have to worry about the future. There are no more surgeries. This is it. If it breaks again, it's done forever. This is the last in a long line of hopeful fixes for Big Cat.
"I was talking to my surgeon about this is that I felt how long will this fused back hold up? It's like my microdiscectomies, how long is that going to hold up," Woods said. "He says, 'You'll be fine for the rest of your life because it's bone and bone, you're fine.' How hard is it to break a leg? It's not easy break a leg. Same thing, it's not easy to break that part of your back."
I'm not sure if this is encouraging or not, but the language has a finality to it.
"I was still struggling with some nerve issues down my leg when I came back at Isleworth (in 2014)," Woods said. "Last year I was the same but it was better, but not where it's at now. You know, I'm not going to be dunking a basketball anytime soon, but I'm able to live without any lower back pain or any kind of zinging down my leg or have foot drop. I don't have any of those issues anymore. That's why it is very different. ... Last year I was still struggling a little bit and this year it's night and day."
We don't know if he's telling the complete truth, of course. What is the difference between stiffness and pain, anyway, and is there a way to tell? Those are unanswerable questions. All we can do is take him at his word, and his word is that he wasn't great last year and he is great this year.
This is a safe place to push all your chips into the middle of the table on the rest of Woods' career. Woods could crack or tear something this weekend, and that's a wrap for the rest of his career. You need not worry about having anything in the bank of emotion because there will be nobody to spend it on.
The flip side of that, though, is a question we've been batting around for a few days here: What if he's OK?
What if his swing doesn't look great but when you're the smartest golfer in history, you don't need a great-looking swing? What if he can actually practice putting now because it doesn't hurt him to stand over a golf ball? What if he plays 10 tournaments in 2017? What if he plays for 10 more years? What if his mind allows him to let go, and what if letting go is what gets him back to 70 percent of what he once was?
That's enough, of course. Anything would be enough at this point. I wrote last year that Woods' final chapter had a chance to be his best one yet. I was wrong. The story didn't have a happy ending, and the hero lost the last battle. There's still the epilogue, though. The tacked-on edition of this long, sweeping narrative. I don't know if it will be a heartwarming epilogue or more sadness. All I know is that we're finally at the end of the book.
