When the gallery at East Lake Golf Club spilled onto the 18th fairway Sunday afternoon, it became difficult to find Tiger Woods in its midst. Golf is such a solitary pursuit — so often just the hole, the ball, the club and the player — that even its most triumphant occasions are normally celebrated in solitude. In so many of his 80 PGA Tour victories, Woods has made that walk up 18 all by himself.
It is an offshoot of the world Woods constructed for so long. But just days after his own personal redemption — a victory in the Tour Championship, his first tournament win in more than five years — Woods is in Paris for what should be the golf event that brings the most fun but instead has brought Woods, even and especially at his height, the most angst. Friday morning, Woods will begin competing in his eighth Ryder Cup.
Know how many times Woods has celebrated with his teammates, spraying champagne and hoisting that cup?
Once.
“We haven’t done well,” Woods said.
It’s such a striking stat, and it’s suddenly relevant this weekend at Le Golf National. Even with all the travails — physical and emotional, self-inflicted and not — that made Sunday’s victory remarkable, Tiger Woods owns 14 major championships, second only to Jack Nicklaus, and those 80 PGA Tour titles, second only to Sam Snead. Yet at the Ryder Cup, he has hurt more than helped.
Woods’s lifetime Ryder Cup record: 13-17-3. Take away singles matches — where he gets to play, you know, alone — and it’s 9-16-1. He was the best player in the world for almost the entirety of two decades, and he regularly beat fields of 144 or 156 competitors. Yet with a teammate by his side and two Europeans to stare down, he barely won once every three times.
“Looking back on my entire Ryder Cup career, that’s not something that I have really enjoyed and I’ve really liked seeing,” Woods told reporters in Paris this week.
[Thomas Boswell: Tiger Woods’s failures made him human, so we all can embrace his redemption]
In a Ryder Cup career that dates from 1997, Woods has lost to or tied teams featuring Europe’s luminaries (Colin Montgomerie and Nick Faldo and Sergio Garcia and the like) and its also-rans (Ignacio Garrido, anyone?). As an individual competitor, he long held the reputation as an intimidator, complete with stats to show his playing partners in the final rounds of tournaments produced worse scores alongside him than they did playing with someone who didn’t attract such a gallery. Coincidence? No one thought so.
But put him with a teammate, and . . . yuck. Woods has lost with Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker, which he can’t do this year, because Furyk’s the captain and Stricker’s a vice captain, and neither is competing. Woods’s body and game were in such a state last year that Furyk named Woods a vice captain, too, a role he enjoyed in 2016, when the Americans won a thrilling competition at Hazeltine. Still, it’s an odd sight: Tiger, with an earpiece wrapped around his head rather than a hand wrapped around a club.
The way Woods is coming into this Ryder Cup, though, doesn’t it feel like it could turn? The victory at the Tour Championship represented a physical comeback from the back surgeries that left him struggling to get out of bed. But it was also part of a rebranding, and choking back tears mattered. This is not the automaton Woods who won tournaments he was supposed to win with the kind of golf he was supposed to play. This was more real and accessible, more human.
Could that make him a better teammate? This is his first Ryder Cup appearance since 2012. Win a match Friday morning, and it’ll certainly be interpreted that way. It would fit the arc of his career: People revered the “Hello, World” Tiger who first truly appeared at the 1997 Masters and showed how much better he was than anyone, maybe ever, at the 2000 U.S. Open. But vulnerability can add layers to a character, too, and Woods has been nothing but vulnerable for the better part of a decade.
It’s also possible this is all overthinking, that even though Woods will have a partner in Friday’s opening matches, his shots will be hit only by him — that solitary pursuit again. Plus, there’s this, from Phil Mickelson on Woods at the Tour Championship: “This is the best I think I’ve ever seen him swing the club, even going back to 2000, when I thought he was at his best.”
[Hoping for a Tiger Woods-Phil Mickelson pairing at the Ryder Cup? Don’t count on it.]
We have seen his best at major championships. We have seen his best on Tour. We have seen it so rarely at the Ryder Cup.
That’s true for the generation that will carry this competition into the future, for Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas and Patrick Reed, et al. Not only have the young American stars never been teammates with Woods — U.S. vs. Europe, with a continent rooting against them — but they never really faced Tiger in competition at his best, either.
“I think that when my game is there, I feel like I’ve always been a tough person to beat,” Woods said. “They have jokingly been saying that, ‘We want to go against you.’
“All right. Here you go.”
That worked at East Lake, where he took a three-shot lead into the final round and, as was his trademark for so long, finished it off. But even with the larger implications of his victory there — a renewed pursuit of the marks held by Nicklaus and Snead, a rejuvenation of the sport in which he remains the most important figure — he was playing, essentially, for himself, an enhancement and extension of his own legacy.
This week, he plays for himself and his teammates. And if he manages to win his matches, and the U.S. wins the Ryder Cup on European soil for the first time in a quarter of a century, he’ll go a long way toward completing a transformation that few could have foreseen a year ago. Tiger Woods, champion golfer, was a character established long ago. Tiger Woods, champion teammate, could emerge this week.
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