Expectations Are Tiger Woods' Greatest Obstacle Heading into 2013 Masters

Tiger Woods sat at the podium at Augusta National Tuesday answering question after question about his game, his preparedness and the expectations of returning to a tournament he has won four times in his illustrious career.

And he’s never looked calmer.

Woods has spent much of the last two years answering questions, but they haven’t all been about golf—at least not about his play. All that has changed, and all it took was a dominant start to 2013.

With a win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational on March 24, Woods jumped budding superstar Rory McIlroy to regain his No. 1 standing in the world golf rankings. It was his third win in five tournaments this year, telling us what we all have long suspected—Tiger is back.

And therein lies the problem, and perhaps the biggest obstacle Woods faces as he prepares for the Masters on April 11.

Expectations are as high as they have ever been for the world’s best golfer, who, at 37, isn’t the same player we’ve always known him to be. Make no mistake, Tiger is still dominant, but his game is changing as a result of age, diminishing flexibility and a bad left knee that has plagued him in recent years.

Those factors have led to Woods developing a new swing, to which he admitted in his interview session on the Golf Channel Tuesday from Augusta.

Yahoo! Sports' Dan Wetzel reported Woods' comments:

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"I wasn't physically capable of doing it," he said. "I wasn't healthy enough. Couldn't practice, couldn't play and just wasn't able to do any of the sessions that I needed to do to improve. And I was making a swing change."

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It has worked well for him this year, but Augusta National is a different animal. That’s not to say Tiger can’t be as dominant as ever this weekend, but unpredictability reigns supreme in golf’s most prestigious tournament.

Still, it seems the room for error has decreased dramatically since his hot start this year. People expect Tiger to tee off Thursday morning and never look back. In a field with three-time Masters winner Phil Mickelson and defending champion Bubba Watson, it is Woods who will be considered the biggest failure if he doesn’t win another green jacket this time around.

It’s not as if the whispers and expectations are tongue-in-cheek. The excitement is palpable, and the entire golf world waits anxiously for Tiger’s triumphant return to Augusta—this time in prime form with the memories of an awful Friday round of a year ago neatly tucked away.

The expectations facing Tiger are nothing new. He was expected to post better than a five-over 40th-place finish last year and he was expected to challenge for the green jacket after (ironically enough) he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational prior to last year’s tournament.

How that anticipation affects Tiger this year remains to be seen. Perhaps his calm demeanor and incredible start to the season will blind him to all of it, but there’s no denying the hopes every golf fan has for Tiger this weekend.

Woods is arguably the greatest golfer to ever play the game, and no one wants to see his reputation exceed his play. At some point it will happen, but no one expects it to happen this weekend, especially after all the evidence to suggest he can be as dominant as ever at this point in his career.

With a new swing, a string of wins under his belt and the apparent confidence to leave Augusta with his fifth green jacket, the expectations are justified. Will they be too much to overcome this weekend?

All signs point to that not being the case, but I guess that’s the point.