Tiger Woods underwent a microdiscectomy to relieve nerve pain in his lower back and will not compete at next week’s Farmers Insurance Open or Genesis Invitational.
An announcement came through Woods’ Twitter account that he had “recently undergone a microdiscectomy procedure to remove a fragment of pressurized disc that was pinching his nerve after feeling discomfort after the PNC Championship.”
Woods knows the procedure well. He did it three times – once in the spring of 2014 and twice in the fall of 2015. He ended up undergoing a more serious operation called spinal arthrodesis in April 2017, which prevented him from playing golf for six months.
He returned from this surgery in 2018 and won the Tour Championship that year, followed by the Masters in 2019 and the Zozo Championship later that year.
Woods, 45, struggled for most of 2020 and sometimes complained of stiffness and back pain.
After drawing ninth at the Farmers Insurance Open a year ago, he never came close to fighting in the eight tournaments he played the rest of the year. He ended in a tie for 38th place at the Masters in November.
The PNC Championship is the 36-hole event that he played last month with his 11-year-old son Charlie.
“I’m looking forward to starting training and getting back on the Tour, ” Woods said in the statement, which also acknowledged that it will not compete in either of the two tournaments in California that it should play.
When Woods did his first back surgery on March 31, 2014, he returned to competition in June of the same year, although many believed it was too early. He did the procedure again in September 2015 and six weeks later.