Tiger Woods Must Accept His Fate as Average If He's Once Again to Be Elite

Tiger Woods. PGA Tour player.

Given a career resume that makes him a mandatory part of chats about the game’s all-time greats, even suggesting such a label seems blasphemous.

After all, he has 79 tour victories and 14 major championships. The Associated Press deemed him the “Athlete of the Decade” for the first 10 years of the millennium.

He’ll be the player today’s 45-year-olds tell their grandkids they saw in his prime.

Still, as anyone who watched CBS on Sunday can attest, those days feel long gone.

Though he woke up the echoes and dominated social media with three solid rounds at the Wyndham Championship, he was eight shots off the lead by the time he reached the 13th tee in the final round, and his feel-good story was quickly replaced by the novelty of a 51-year-old winner in Davis Love III.

“Once the tension level went down after the triple [bogey] at 11, he fought back with birdies,” CBS on-course reporter Peter Kostis reasoned. “He’s building the layers of confidence. He’d love to have that chip back at 11 that forced [a] triple bogey. Everything else has looked very positive.”

It sounds reasonable to the casual ear. And it might even be correct on some level.

But no matter how hard the announce crew pumped a four-birdies-in-six-holes finish, the truest measure of where Woods stands relative to today’s peers is evidenced by the fact he entered the last round two shots down and gave four away before what amounted to a cosmetic rally.

"I gave myself a chance and I had all the opportunity in the world today to do it," said Woods, according to ESPN.com's Bob Harig. "And I didn't get it done."

Put in a contending situation on a Triple-A leaderboard, he went from second to 10th. He failed to qualify for the FedExCup Playoffs. He doesn’t warrant a Presidents Cup selection. And the world ranking of 286 that he carried in Sunday won’t change much when numbers are recrunched Monday.

He’s the NFL team that wins three straight to reach 7-9 and insists momentum will carry over.

But unless he changes his fundamentals, it won’t.

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

In fact, outside of a ratings jolt for CBS and a ticket spike for Wyndham, the reality is a late-summer weekend in 2015 doesn’t mean a thing for springtime 2016, unless it convinces a by-then-40-year-old Tiger that the shortest distance between him and relevance is golf, golf and more golf.

He played 11 tournaments this season and had more missed cuts (four) than top-10 finishes (one).

So, unless he’s OK with being more nostalgia than necessary, that’s the main thing to address.

Presuming the body is able—a big question for a guy with his medical file—the most effective way for Woods to fan the Greensboro confidence flames is to be willing to exchange his royalty card (read: ego) for one that makes him like any other guy competing each week to make a mortgage payment.

It’s a given he’ll hit the majors at Augusta, Oakmont, Royal Troon and Baltusrol.

He’s earned them all and then some.

To get back to where those weeks are beyond ceremonial, though, he has to hit the minors too.

He has to play the Northern Trust Opens. He has to play the John Deere Classics. He has to play the Humana Challenges. He needs to get his groove back on the smallest stages, so that when he gets to the biggest ones and things go bad, he has enough feel to get them back to good.    

Forget Paul McCartney at Madison Square Garden. Woods must be Bruce Springsteen at a state fair.

If the Wyndham experience proved anything for Tiger, it was that he can still drive the fairway, he can still attack the flag sticks and he can still make putts. Maybe it's not on the level now owned by the Jordans, Rorys and Jasons of the world, but it's certainly one where he’s more than a “remember him” alternative.

Showing up 11 times in 2016 isn’t going to do it.