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Back in mid-September, Tiger Woods announced that he had a second procedure on his back, after already missing 4 months for the same issue last season. While this surgery wasn’t as severe as the first one, it still made for some interesting headlines earlier last week. Woods, who has been the face of the PGA Tour for well over a decade spoke with media outlets about his latest operation and the recovery time that comes along with it. When asked about how much time he was expected to miss, he was quoted saying, “I feel good, I’m just stiff; that’s the way it is after surgery… I haven’t been allowed to do much of anything. I’ll start my rehab soon, but it’s a long and tedious process. The last time it took me a long time to come back. Some of the guys who have had it (micro discectomy) done said it took them over a year to be pain free. I hope it doesn’t take me that long to be pain free.”
One can begin to wonder how big of a setback this really is. An injury of this magnitude can be devastating for a golfer, especially one that swings the club as aggressively as Tiger. Golf itself does, however, take a toll on your body, considering most pro golfers on the PGA tour are playing 18 holes nearly every day, along with swinging clubs on the range and chipping and putting at the practice area during the season. Tiger himself put in a ton of work this past season to try to improve his game as a whole, but never really found it. He has struggled to make cuts and if he did make the cuts, he was always playing from behind in the field.
Analysts throughout this past season tried to digest what they were seeing. The swing was gone, he struggled early chipping, and he was missing putts that he was known for making back in his dominant years. The bigger issue was the withdrawing of tournaments throughout the year, including the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in early February, where he was visibly in pain and claimed that the weather delay shut down his glutes and he couldn’t get them reactivated. His glutes? Really? He probably should have just admitted that his play wasn’t up to par or that he wasn’t fully recovered from his first back surgery.
Did Tiger make the right choice by attempting to play this past season if he knew that the actual recovery time was longer than what he allowed his body to take? Tiger is really the only person that can answer that question. Many people claim that he’ll play at some point this year, but it’s tough to tell how much or even when he decides to tee it up. If he does, it’ll be interesting to see if this surgery is the career killer, because we’ve already seen the decline from a year ago. Golf fans across America see it, but they don’t want to admit it. Hopefully we’re all wrong, but this looks like the end of Tiger Woods, and it appears his chase for Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 major wins is slowly fading away.