Tiger Woods: 5 Hot Takes on the Golfer's Prospects for Return

Surely by now you’ve seen the full-on horror show video of Tiger Woods rinsing three shots from 100 yards at Congressional earlier this month.

If somehow morbid curiosity hasn’t gotten the better of you yet, you can watch at the Daily Mail (viewer discretion advised).

And now, time to insert the obligatory reminder that Tiger Woods hasn’t competed in a PGA Tour event since last August, when he showed signs of life before ultimately faltering at the Wyndham Championship in a failed bid to book passage into the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The 14-time major winner then had a pair of back surgeries, in September and October of last year, and has offered nothing concrete to the ravenous horde awaiting his return beyond variations on the fact that he’s “progressing.”

So, as the golfing universe still (perhaps inexplicably) revolves around Tiger Woods, the takes have come rolling in faster than galleries used to scramble to surround his ball for optimum viewing when TW missed a fairway.

Here are five of them, including the golfer’s own.

David Feherty

Uncredited/Associated Press

NBC Sports and Golf Channel commentator David Feherty offered his perspective on the eternal if/when of Tiger Woods’ return (via Ryan Ballengee of Yahoo Sports), indicating that he’s concerned because Woods’ back problems are fundamentally nerve-related, not skeletal or muscular.  

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“I am not sure that Tiger will come back because it is a nerve in his back. It’s not muscular or skeletal. It’s not something you can deal with in a physical way.

“He is in phenomenal shape - just ripped as usual. But he is not able to make a full pass at it. I saw him a few weeks ago in Houston and he hadn’t played in five months and he hit some good shots and some awful skanky looking things.

“I think he has a feeling that if he doesn’t make it back this time, he might be done from a physical standpoint. But he is too stubborn and too good and too physically gifted to be able to just give it up. He loves it too much.

“I don’t think he needs to do this. He wants to do this. He really, really does. But I am not sure that he can. I am not sure he is in any way clear on whether he can either.”

 

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Tiger Truthers

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

So, after a tight-backed Tiger Woods unceremoniously dumped three golf balls into a hazard from little more than 100 yards at a media day at Congressional Country Club, looking more like a 20-handicapper than a man once expected to win 20 majors, most of the golf world reacted with shock, anguish and despair.

And many overinflated the significance of the meaningless trio of wedge strikes, seeing evidence that the 14-time major winner won’t be putting a peg in the ground on the PGA Tour anytime soon. Enter the Tiger Truthers: A number of individuals in the social media sphere (font of all wisdom that it is) who contended that TW deliberately rinsed the shots. Deliberately! And to what end? Lowering expectations? Creating a smoke screen? Who knows.

Golf fanalysts No Laying Up collected a few of a the gems.

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Be safe out there y'all. It's a crazy world. pic.twitter.com/ngGihySmqu

— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) May 17, 2016"

Paul Azinger

Charles Neibergall/Associated Press

Jaime (no, not “Jamie”) Diaz, editor-in-chief of Golf World and a senior writer for Golf Digest, quoted analyst Paul Azinger thusly:

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“I was a huge show-off. Especially when I was at my best, I loved showing people how good I was. But when what I was showing off stopped being as good as what I used to show off, and when I realized I was being measured against that old standard, I started thinking less about showing off and more about not embarrassing myself. When you lose that confidence that you will impress people or your peers, then it becomes uncomfortable. You feel way more pressure. And the game stops being fun.

“Nobody liked to show off more than Tiger. Not in a bragging way, it’s just that he knew how good he was, and the effect it had on people. He fed on that, and it was one of the reasons he kept getting better and better. It was like an elixir.”

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In short, Woods may want to hide his golf game behind his Nike polos in the corner of a dark closet.

Hank Haney

Chris O'Meara/Associated Press

And of course, no discussion of Tiger Woods would be complete without the opinion of a man who has fattened his wallet substantially doling out hot takes on his former pupil.

Hank Haney, who coached Woods from 2004 to 2010, said he doesn’t think TW is going to compete on the PGA Tour this season (per Kyle Porter of CBS Sports).

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"It just looks to me like it's going to be a while and maybe next year because there's nothing that we're hearing that tells us that Tiger is anywhere near ready to come back. The chance that he has to play great is better if he starts off next year and really gives himself plenty of time to just heal, to get his game going, and then take a run at it next year if he's ready to do that."

"I don't doubt that there's time to still see greatness...I have a hard time believing that we won't still see greatness. But I don't think we're going to see that greatness this year because I think the clock is ticking and it has ticked its way down where this year because this is a tough schedule with everything packed in with the Olympics and everything. I don't think it's going to happen this year."

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Tiger Woods

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

And we might as well hear from the man himself, even when he has little to offer by way of insight, right?

At his inglorious appearance at Congressional, Woods played “Rhapsody on a Theme of I Don’t Know When I’m Coming Back, OK?”

A selection of his hardly inspirational comments, per Jonathan Lehman of the New York Post.

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“If I knew, I’d tell you. Because it’d be fun to know.”

“I get that asked a lot: ‘Great seeing you, I thought you were dead. People have written me off...I’m not fertilizer.”

“I’m excited to hopefully get back out here, to play, to compete, win golf tournaments."

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So, either Woods doesn't know or he's deriving some sadistic pleasure from pretending he has no timetable for return and watching the vortex of speculation swirl.

We'll go with "he genuinely doesn't know."