AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods just broke Sam Snead’s record for PGA Tour victories — in his own mind, anyway. That’s right, for the first time in his incomparable career, Woods decided Thursday that he had won something just by showing up.
He has never been more right in his professional life. So if you’re keeping score at home, and if you subscribe to Woods’ dogma on his absurdly improbable comeback, that would be Tiger 83, Slammin’ Sammy 82.
After he shot a 1-under 71 in the first round of the Masters, Woods was asked if he considered his first start in 17 months — and his first start since he wrecked his car not even 14 months ago — the equivalent of a victory.
“Yes,” he responded.
That answer was the biggest upset at the Masters since Trevor Immelman beat Tiger in 2008.
Woods has never, ever defined victory as anything other than a trophy in his hands or a green jacket over his shoulders. But 509 days after his last competitive round — at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Masters — and 408 days after his crash, Woods found the perfect time to make an exception. Why?
“If you would have seen how my leg looked to where it’s at now, the pictures, some of the guys know,” he said. “They’ve seen the pictures, and they’ve come over to the house and they’ve seen it. To see where I’ve been, to get from there to here, it was no easy task.”
Tiger Woods tees off on the 18th hole Thursday at Augusta National.Getty Images
Woods faced possible amputation of his right leg, three weeks in a hospital and three months in a hospital bed, and then a grueling regimen of treatment and therapy to rebuild that leg into a functioning limb for the most forbidding walk in golf. “People have no idea how hard it’s been,” he said.
They had a better idea after they watched Woods hobble around this hilly, 7,510-yard ballpark, in his Monday and Wednesday test runs, fighting his way from one shot to the next. Everyone who got a look at Tiger, including some of his best friends, agreed that he was hitting the hell out of the ball, and that the only legitimate question about his presence was whether he could walk 72 holes.
The mystery of it all created a sense of great expectation at the first tee when Woods arrived at 11 a.m. in his hot pink shirt, black slacks and black cap. The crowd was eight fans deep on one side of a walking lane, and ten fans deep on the other. At 11:04, a Masters official announced, “Fore please, now driving, Tiger Woods.” And then Woods sent his first drive to the right side, near the bunker. After hitting his approach shot a bit short of paydirt, Tiger scolded himself, or the ball. “Oh, come on,” he said. It was game on.
He saved par on the first hole by nailing a 10-footer while a drone buzzed above the green, waving his right hand in acknowledgment of the explosive roar and setting a good tone for a very good walk unspoiled. Another member of his group, Joaquin Niemann, said he tried to talk to his caddie “and I couldn’t hear anything that he was saying.” The world’s best players were competing in the world’s most prestigious tournament, but in reality, Tiger was the only game in town.
Woods weathered a couple of unfortunate bounces on the front nine, including a birdie putt at the fifth that he was stepping into in celebratory form when it suddenly spun out and inspired him to recoil and turn away while the gallery groaned. Waiting forever for the green to clear from the fairway of the par-5 eighth, Woods bent forward and extended his arms behind him, interlocked his fingers and stretched out his back. He then made an unholy mess of the hole, turning a birdie opportunity into a bogey. “Just three bad shots in a row,” Woods said.
But on this sunshiny day, nothing could rain on Tiger’s parade, not even a dreadful warm-up session on the range or the oppressive five-hour and twenty-minute pace. He birdied the sixth and 13th holes, and erased a bogey at the 14th by sinking a sweet right-to-left birdie breaker on the 16th, where Woods memorably seized control of the tournament in 2019 and won his fifth green jacket. Tiger delivered Thursday’s most emphatic fist pump on that hole, and then lifted his putter in the air after retrieving his ball. “The place was electric,” he said.
Guess who made it that way.
“I did something positive today,” Woods said.
He did one of the damnedest things he’s ever done on a golf course. Just as he promised his medical and training staff, Woods got “into my own little world” during the round and used the adrenaline as a weapon against his pain.
“My leg,” he said, “it’s going to be difficult for the rest of my life.”
So Woods planned on plunging his sore body into a couple of ice baths Thursday night and, in his words, “just basically freezing myself to death” to get ready for Friday. But no matter what goes down the rest of the Masters, Tiger just produced a career first.
He won without winning. And yes, victory No. 83 might’ve been greater than any of his first 82.