Golf is a game of questions.
Tiger Woods has always provided the most precise and efficient answers. He has given them in the rain. He has given them in the heat. He has given them under the greatest duress. His answers have always usurped those of everyone else in attendance. They were not binary, per se, even though this game seems like it can be. The answers of his colleagues were good, but Woods' answers are the ones that made everyone else gasp. He was (and is) a genius.
For the last five years, though, Woods went silent. Questions persisted -- as they always have and will until the end of time -- but this thoroughbred put his palms up and shrugged. He had not forgotten how to answer, he simply did not possess the physical capability to do so.
Back surgery after back surgery laid him so low that the concept of getting out of bed seemed a Herculean task on par with anything Woods has ever accomplished on the course. We thought he was done. He thought he was done.
Do you remember the 2015 Hero World Challenge? Tiger hobbled around the place like he was 79 (not his actual age of 39). The contrast was stark. An iconic athlete painted against a beautiful Bahamian backdrop unable to unfurl his once limitless body. It was sad and sobering and all the other adjectives we use to describe once-transcendent superstars who have hung on to their profession for far too long.
Two years later at the same event, we were dubious. Woods had undergone a spinal fusion surgery eight months earlier and wasn't allowed to even chip a golf ball until September of 2017. If anyone has the instruction manual imprinted on his DNA, it's Tiger. But even then it seemed too much to ask him to return at any level in 2018. For those among us who were not delusional -- a majority, mind you -- it seemed as if this would be a multi-year bumpy ride (at best).
"I didn't know if I'd be able to compete at this level," Woods told NBC this week. "I was hoping just for a better lifestyle. ... It's been an evolving feeling and journey."
But Woods had a few answers in the Bahamas during that week last December. The questions were meek. Softballs only someone of his stature has the capital to demand. The answers were sufficient, though. He could play. He could move around. Hell, he could walk without pain.
A month later at the Farmers Insurance Open, Woods answered a few more. He could make a cut. He could fight for par. He could fire his glutes. He could play seemingly pain-free golf on the PGA Tour. Honestly, that alone was a big win if his 2018 campaign had only advanced that far.
The Florida swing brought more queries and more responses from Big Cat. Can you get in the mix? Woods finished 12th at the Honda Classic. Can you take a shot on the back nine on a Sunday? Woods placed T2 at the Valspar Championship. Can you ride with the best in the game? Woods went to the final few holes at the Arnold Palmer Invitational with Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose before fading.
The major season brought another round. Tiger continued to search for and find legitimate, compelling answers. He could lead at a major (The Open Championship). He could put on a performance worthy of winning a major (PGA Championship). He could build a statistical profile of somebody who wins multiple times on the PGA Tour in a season. It was all there, it just hadn't all happened at one event.
There was a rhythm to Woods' season. A slow build to ... something. At any given time, we didn't know it would eventually be a victory at the 2018 Tour Championship and thunderous sendoff to the Ryder Cup in Paris, but Woods stacked foundational truths about his game throughout the year. In the end, at the final event of the PGA Tour season, he stood on them and won this week at East Lake for the first time anywhere since 2013.
The game never stops asking you what's inside you, what's in your hands and what's in your mind. It is the ficklest mistress and the ultimate meritocracy. You can't pretend in golf -- like you can in other sports -- that someone is playing better than their performance shows. Your score is your score. If you shoot 85, you shot 85. At some point, it's who you are as a golfer.
This is why I find it so compelling an endeavor. Tiger couldn't fake any of this. He had to do the work. He had to find the feels. He had to look at 29 of the best players in the world for a week at East Lake Golf Club and say, I'm better than all of you, and here are 269 shots to prove it. There's a raw veracity to that reality that you can't find in any other sport. Because of that, when it's done, it can leave you stunned.
"After Rory's tap out and all of a sudden it started hitting me that I was going to win the tournament," Woods told NBC on Sunday night, "I started tearing up a little bit. Reason why I knelt down behind the ball was, 'OK, I gotta get to work here. Come on, finish this off.' I can't believe I pulled this off after the seasons I've gone through."
Woods paused as the crowd behind him erupted in cheers.
"It's been tough. I've had it not so easy the last couple of years," he continued. "I've worked my way back and couldn't have done it without the help of everyone around me. Some of the players that I saw after out on the 18th green here, some knew what I was struggling with. It was really special to see them there. It's just hard to believe I won the Tour Championship."
The answers in the end came not from Woods but from those surrounding him on the 18th fairway in the final round on the final hole of the 2017-18 season. It was an historic timestamp, this amoeba of patrons marching toward victory No. 80. It was the most staggering scene of the golf year. Maybe of the last five years.
The fans almost literally carried him home to the victory. It feels inept to describe it as an exclamation mark to the season because, in some ways, it was the season.
The ultimate question that persisted was veiled like this over the last five years: Will Tiger Woods ever win again? The actual question, though, was much deeper.
What everyone has wanted to know about Tiger Woods was whether there was still hope. Life is discouraging and frustrating and oftentimes very hard. Sports and heroes (and sports heroes) provide hope. It is not a perfect type of hope, but it can leave us captivated by something bigger than ourselves. The real question being asked was not, Can he do this, but rather, Can I? Whatever "this" is.
I've mentioned this moment before, so apologies for going to the well again, but it seems apropos given what we saw on Sunday. When Secretariat torched the field at the 1973 Belmont Stakes, Jack Nicklaus -- smack in the middle of his own field torching at every major in the 1970s -- was overcome with emotion.
When Secretariat entered the stretch alone, and kept coming and coming -- and he was still alone -- the country wept for joy without knowing why. Also alone in his Florida home, golfer Jack Nicklaus found himself on all fours in front of a TV set, pounding his fists into the carpet and crying.
"I don't know why I did that," he later told the writer and actor Heywood Hale Broun, who thought he knew the reason. "It's because you've spent your entire life searching for absolute perfection," Broun said, "and you finally saw it." That's what Secretariat represented: perfection.
It seems such an elusive and ambiguous quality: perfection. So when we catch a glimmer, it can be transformative.
Tiger Woods is as perfect a golfer as anyone in history ever has been or ever will be. He does not have all of the answers, but on Sunday for four hours -- and specifically for one final hole -- he reminded us of what perfection looks like. Not for a single round -- a 1-over 71 isn't taking anyone's breath away -- but for the entire arc of a career.
As Woods descended the hill on No. 18 at East Lake and bobbed in and out of a delirious ball of phones and flesh, he didn't say much. He didn't need to. The scene delivered a full-throated response to five years' worth of chatter:
Yes, Tiger Woods is still great. Yes, there's still hope.