Tiger Woods: His Next Major Starts Now at Hero World Challenge

Tiger Woods has been a man of mystery for most of 2014. Now, as the year concludes, he is teeing it up in what could be considered his next major. It's a major because he will finally get a chance to see whether he is able to play high-level, professional golf again.        

Even he is uncertain how his body will respond.

"It's going to be nice playing a tournament this week and getting a feel for being under the heat and see where my swing is," he said Tuesday.

He said he needs to know not just where his good shots are going, but also where his bad shots are going.

"Am I able to rectify them right away, or is it going to take a shot or two, or a hole or two?," he wondered. "Or maybe, I might not be able to do it at all, and that might not be a good thing."

One thing he does know is that the time away from golf has allowed him to regain physical strength so that, as he explained it, his muscles, tendons and ligaments hold his joints in place more effectively. He admits to soreness from training but said he does not need to see a chiropractor every day to be able to play, which he did previously.

Regarding the parting with former swing coach Sean Foley, Woods said that there was nothing wrong with Foley's method.

"I think that physically, I just wasn't able to do some of the things that we wanted to do in the golf swing," he said. "We are still very good friends, and we still needle each other quite a bit on texting. So that part has been fantastic, but on a professional level, I think I needed to go a different direction."

Woods cited eight victories in a two-year time span as proof of Foley's system but added, "Things were progressing in the right direction. But unfortunately, physically, I was getting damaged doing it."

Being away from playing and practicing gave Woods time to think about his game, his swing, the changes he has made over the years, the various swing coaches he has worked with and what he wants to do now to preserve his ability to continue to play in his 40s. Woods' introspection led to the realization that, for him, everything old is about to be new again.

"Father Time is undefeated," Woods noted. "We all have to make adaptations as athletes, and we have to make adjustments. And I'm no different. As I've explained to you guys many times, like MJ [Michael Jordan] created a fadeaway. He couldn't jump over everybody anymore, and he created a new way to score and get points."

Hopefully, Woods' new swing guru, Chris Como, will help him get there. Como is a recommendation from Notah Begay, college teammate of Woods' at Stanford, whom he trusts to give him good advice. Como's specialty is biomechanics, which studies cause and effect of relationships in motions made by humans and other living things.  

And so we are about to see the next revised game plan for Tiger Woods. What will it look like?

Woods said he doesn't have to outhit Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson or other younger players. He just needs to beat the golf course. He knows he has enough length to do that. He doesn't have to chase length as an end-all be-all, certainly not to the detriment of his body.

Woods said he wants a swing that will allow him to be able to be competitive like Greg Norman and Tom Watson were at the British Open in their 50s.

After looking at old videos of his U.S. Amateur victories and his swing from the early and mid-1990s, he determined that was the place to start. The biggest challenge in that was finding someone with a VHS machine, but luckily, his mother had one.

The job Como is being asked to do is to coax Woods' body into something that more closely resembles his old, old, old swing. Woods doesn't have to reinvent the wheel; he just needs to dust off the cobwebs of one he already knows.

"It's an old motor pattern," he explained. "I'm able to generate speed, and I have the range of motion, and it's interesting to see how—I don't feel like I'm hitting it very hard, but it's coming off the face faster. That part was exciting, to start feeling that again."

What he doesn't know is how long it will take to get his feel for shots in competition and when he can expect to get proper feel for hitting the ball a certain distance, a specific trajectory. He also knows he has to factor in the outdoor elements like wind, the lie and so forth. His rustiness in those areas are all unknowable until he tees it up.

"Like I said, it's new, but old. The reason why I said it that way is I just haven't done it in a long time, but my body is remembering it. The motor patterns, you develop all these different motor patterns," he added. "It's familiar, so it has not taken me that long to implement it."

Whether Woods posts a 65 or an 85 in any round of the Hero World Challenge this week, he will at least play four rounds of competitive golf against guys who definitely want to beat him. His play will tell him and the rest of us what he can do now and how much work he still has left before he plays like the Tiger Woods of old. That's what makes this week a major.

Kathy Bissell is a Golf Writer for Bleacher Report. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained firsthand or from official interview materials from the USGA, PGA Tour, R&A or PGA of America.