Tiger Woods did not need a win to validate this comeback. But he got one anyway.

Tiger Woods’ final putt to win the Tour Championship had not even gone in on Sunday night and we were already doing it. Because this is 2018, we needed to attach some sort of label to the win. So this win completed the “greatest comeback ever” in golf, or sometimes it was all of sports, or it was “arguably” the greatest comeback ever or maybe the second greatest comeback ever in golf.

This is a label that cannot be neatly defined or measured. We’ll stick to just golf at the moment, where the other option for this subjective title is Ben Hogan, who was, ahem, hit by a bus and slowly rehabbed his wrecked body to come back and win six more majors in the 1950s. Hogan and Tiger are probably your candidates if you want to go tussle with someone about it on social media. You will probably find a lot of allies on the Tiger side, given he’s the instant reason we’re here talking about this.

Tiger winning an 80th PGA Tour event seemed so remote, so improbable as recently as nine months ago that his getting back to this point is certainly one of the great comebacks you will ever see. But we’re going to take a break from hollering about where this goes in history. Set the sorting aside for a moment and appreciate the win in the context of Tiger’s past, where he is right now, and where he might be going.

The Past

There was a time in Tiger Woods’ career when winning the Tour Championship would hardly register as an accomplishment. This was not 10 or 15 years ago, but it was just five years ago. Tiger had done everything in the game and when you’ve won so much, you oddly have less to gain from everything but the highest stakes moments. If a powerhouse basketball or football program wins its division or a regular season title, the response is “that’s what they’re supposed to do.” The expectations are heightened for a conference championship and then a national championship or NCAA tournament run.

Tiger reached a spot in his career where nearly all the weight was put on running up his major championships tally. He was supposed to win at Firestone and Doral and Bay Hill and all these “regular” PGA Tour stops he’d owned for 15 years. It got to the point that winning again at one of those places almost raised more questions about the value of that win and why it was not also happening at a major.

This was crazy. Winning on the PGA Tour, any tournament, is extremely difficult. Tiger’s dominance warped the standards for himself and he was never going to be able to just quietly fade into the sunset of his career, the time when one would naturally win less majors than at the prime of your career. So when Tiger won, it also came with the question “but what did he win?” that no other player would have to answer.

Then he had four back surgeries, chipping yips, bad golf, another public break-up, a DUI, mugshots, rehab, leaked nudes, and a series of short-lived failed comeback attempts. Many of these problems were self-inflicted but this year was not just a simple comeback from some injury and surgery. There was so much more that made Tiger winning again so improbable.

There was the pain of just going through life with his back in deteriorating condition. At varying points it hurt to walk, stand, sit, and lay down. Swinging a golf club is not really a thought, especially when you’re immobile on the ground in your backyard looking for help. A person living out the Life Alert commercial is not really thinking about the cut shot to hit off the first tee at Augusta.

There was the embarrassment of struggling to make the most basic golf shots and looking like some high handicap chop while the cameras tracked his every move. There’s no surgery to repair the yips.

There was the shame of the DUI, which felt like the final touch on his precipitous drop that kept getting more ignominious by the month.

There was the addiction, the health problem we rarely consider compared to the back surgeries. We could see him hobbling and struggling to swing when his back was not right, but effects of his problem with painkillers were far less discernible. Tiger has been quick to cite the back pain and the surgeries but never goes into coming back from a health problem for which he sought “treatment” last summer.

Pain and embarrassment and shame and addiction and this was all since his last win in 2013. We’re not even getting into the fire hydrant crash of 2009 and the effects it has had. Again, a lot of this was self-inflicted. But this comeback is more than just a return from a torn ACL. A combination of physical and mental scars made it unlikely that he’d ever even play competitive golf again. So that’s how you get from that time when winning non-major events had minimal value in the assessment of his career to now, when winning a Tour Championship is one of the best accomplishments of his career.

“It’s certainly up there with obviously all the major championships I’ve won,” Woods reflected on Sunday night. “But this is under different circumstances. You know, I’ve explained throughout the year that I just didn’t know whether this would ever happen again.”

Five years of humiliation and injury can make Sunday at the often sleepy Tour Championship feel like the most triumphant win of an historic career.

The Present

The context of the last five years made Sunday’s win in Atlanta so improbable. But within context of the last five months, it should not have been a surprise.

Here is why this entire comeback season feels so incomprehensibly successful. Tiger did not just get hot with his putter for a day and scratch out some win with smoke and mirrors before disappearing with a mediocre game again. A win felt like a natural endpoint for a player that’s been one of the best in the world in recent months.

No matter what the world rankings say, and they now have Tiger at No. 13 after starting his comeback last November at No. 666, Woods is a consistent top 10 player in the world. He’s been playing like a top 5 player in the world. He finished the PGA Tour season No. 1 in strokes gained approach-the-green. No. 1! This means he’s back to being the best ballstriker in the game, the thing that made him the best ever to do it.

In Atlanta, he combined that ballstriking with the second-best putting week in the field and his best ever driving week at that event. This comeback was already a massive success. The win was just the formal affirmation of it and gave us a reason to celebrate it with unforgettable scenes like this.

The Future

Tiger is going it alone, the greatest golf mind of all time finally just coaching himself. He seems fully comfortable in the swing that he has “pieced together,” as he put it on Sunday night. That golf mind also understands how, at 42, to get around a golf course better than anyone in the game, especially all those younger talents that might be hitting it past him now.

He also seems happy. It’s always precarious to get into the Tiger psychoanalysis based on limited interactions and the public persona he decides to show. He certainly seems happier with his peers and the press and the public. He seems grateful to be here and his fellow pros seem grateful to have him back. It’s been different all season, which he continues to call a “gift” and an opportunity he never thought he would get again.

Now we’ve got Jack Nicklaus back doing the usual routine and saying his majors record is not safe. This comeback could always come undone with one swing that sends him to the ground in pain, but Tiger’s game is whole again and it’s exciting to think of the possibilities ahead.

We started the season just happy to see Tiger try and play competitive golf again. Then we saw shots we never thought we’d see again. Then we saw him go beyond competitive golf and to actual contending golf, even at two major championships. No matter what happens next or how you want to sort it, this comeback year, which Tiger appropriately sent out with a win on the final day of the season, is one of the great performances in sports history.

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