Tiger Woods Will Not Touch A Golf Club Until Early Next Year

Since Tiger Wood’s season ending knee surgery back in July, we have been lucky enough to witness several shocking and exciting moments in golf, moments that have gone a long way to taking our minds off the absence of the world’s number one player. 

We have seen Greg Norman 9-holes away from winning the British Open.

We have seen Padraig Harrington win back-to-back majors making him, aside from Woods, the first player to win two majors in the same season since Mark O’Meara won the Masters and British Open in 1998.

We are now looking forward to a wide open FedEx Cup, and a Ryder Cup that has the potential to be an all out war for the first time in nearly a decade.

But, Tiger’s announcement on his website earlier this week that he will not even touch a golf club until early next year has made even the most die-hard of golf fans take a discouraging deep breath.

"As far as swinging a club, that's not going to happen until next year. I just don't have a choice," Tiger wrote on his website, tigerwoods.com. "We simply don't know what type of swelling there would be, or if there would be any residual effects the next day once you start wheeling and dealing on the knee.”

To make our hearts start pounding even faster, Woods went on to write, "I don't know what the doctors are going to tell me about playing golf down the road.”

We have become so comfortable with Tiger Woods at least overcoming (usually dominating) every challenge thrown at him, that we sometimes forget the fact that this man has just had a major surgery—and is also trying to overcome two stress fractures that could very well nag him for the remainder of his career.

Most athletes take somewhere in the vicinity of a year to recover from reconstructive ACL surgery, while it is probably closer to two years before they are feeling 100% healthy again.

Tiger Woods' recovery will be no different. Although he, at times, can appear to be superhuman on the golf course, he is not. 

He will have to endure the same difficult rehabilitation and recovery as any other athlete who has had such major surgery.

Even as we have been enjoying the excitement the Tiger-less PGA Tour has provided, Woods’ recent announcement has taken the wind out of the sails of even the most die-hard golf fan—as it looks increasingly likely that Woods might not even return for next year’s Masters at the start of April. 

As much as we try to deny that Woods’ absence has taken some of the excitement out of the game, let's be honest here, watching a golfer who will almost certainly become the greatest player to ever play the game is not something that happens very often, and might not happen again in the near future, if ever.

Woods’ career is, at the end of the day,the most exciting thing we will see in this generation of the game—if not the history of the game.

Woods quest to shatter Nicklaus’ record of 18 major wins, and become the undisputed greatest golfer to ever walk the fairways is not the type of thing that comes along very often in the world of sports.

Sure, true golf fans will be interested in the PGA Tour with or without Tiger, but itching to see Tiger get back on the golf course does not make you any less of a true golf fan, in fact I believe the opposite. 

Those true golf fans that have any knowledge of the game’s history will tell you that we are in the midst of seeing history unfold right before our eyes, everytime Woods steps onto a golf course. 

Amongst the inner circles of die-hard golf fans, it has become almost taboo to mention Tiger Woods because, if you do so, you are immediately classed in that category of "Tiger Woods" fans—not "true" fans of the game.

But, a true fan of the game would never dismiss the opportunity to watch possibly the most historic career in the history of the game—a true golf fan would never opt not to enjoy every chance they had to watch history unfold before their eyes.

That would be equivalent to a baseball fan deciding that they didn’t want to watch Babe Ruth play, a basketball fan deciding that they didn’t want to witness Michael Jordan’s career, or a tennis fan saying that they would rather not have watched Roger Federer’s career.    

We can deny that the PGA Tour is any less interesting without Tiger until we are blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is that we have been robbed of half a season, and possibly an entire year of watching a player who will likely become the greatest of all-time, during the absolute prime of his career. 

Everyone, from the fair-weather "Tiger Woods" fan right up to the stark golf historian, well tell you that missing out on what is increasingly looking like a year of Woods' career during his prime is a shame.