Tiger Woods underwent a microdiscectomy procedure to remove a fragment of pressurized disc on his back that he said on Tuesday was causing discomfort after he played the event in Florida with his son, Charlie. Woods completed the procedure after the PNC Championship in December 2020 and is now out of action indefinitely.
The surgery, fifth on Tiger’s back in his career, will prevent Woods from playing the Farmers Insurance Open and Genesis Invitational (an event he organizes) earlier this year.
There is no timetable for his return, as Woods, 45, remains tied for 82 wins on the PGA Tour, which is tied with Sam Snead at all times.
“I’m looking forward to starting training and I’m focused on getting back on the Tour,” Woods said in a statement.
The Masters, where Woods won five times, including in 2019, starts in just 11 weeks.
Woods is leaving one of the most mediocre seasons of his career, as he reached just one of the top 10 in the world in 2020, missed the cut at the United States Open and had no participation in the other two major championships.
He missed a good part of the season at the beginning of the year with back stiffness. That was before the sport ended in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Woods did not play between the Genesis Invitational in February and the Memorial Tournament in July. He also missed events that he usually plays each year, such as the Arnold Palmer Invitational and Players Championship.
While the timing is surprising, this is not necessarily unexpected news about Woods’ career path. After Woods had his massive spinal fusion surgery in 2017, it gave him some time, but probably not as much as many people thought. Here they are New York Times May 2019.
“If you were one of Woods’ competitors, you could say, ‘Maybe I’ll wait a while,'” said Dr. Steven Atlas, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard.
Atlas said he tells patients that it is one thing for an athlete like Woods to have that operation – it can be risky, but he can also take a few more years out of his gambling career, which can be worth millions of dollars.
But he warns typical middle-aged patients. “Once they have this merger, it cannot be undone,” said Atlas. “And it is likely that they will have future surgery in the future” as a result of the causes of the fusion of instability.
“If your goal is a cure, this is not what it will offer,” he said.
Tiger took advantage of the time he bought in 2018-20 by winning three times (including the Masters!). He went up the mountain again, and now the cost of that surgery is starting to come back. The cost was already high, since rehabilitation and physical therapy were undoubtedly incredibly painful, but the future cost was unknown … until now.
And while the nature of this more recent surgery seems relatively minor compared to spinal fusion, the questions remain. First, when will he return and what kind of shape will he be in when he does, since he will be 46 this year? Second, your game was already pretty mediocre in 2020 with (apparently) decent health, so where will you be after that? Three, how many more surgeries will there be in the future?
Put it right, and the bottom line is likely to be that Tiger’s 2019 Masters victory was the biggest achievement in the sport’s history. As he faded for the rest of that year, it became clear that his green jacket may have been the last attack on the record books. Maybe that’s not how it’s going to happen, but maybe it should be. This victory was surprising and an opportunity to honor the best who have won it.
Woods’ price has become so high just to be comfortable, let alone to compete against the world’s Rory McIlroys and Dustin Johnsons. I hope he returns with fervor and as much enthusiasm as he did for that period in late 2018-2019, but the expectation now, at 45, after five back surgeries and the threat of more in the future, is probably that he will do not.