AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods stood within the wonderful daylight of a Georgia spring one afternoon this previous week, a lingering dose of heat earlier than the frigid, hellish hours forward.
“Numerous therapies, a number of ice, a number of ice baths, simply principally freezing myself to loss of life,” Woods mentioned of his plans earlier than his subsequent tee shot at Augusta Nationwide Golf Membership. “That’s simply a part of the deal.”
Uncommon is the athlete whose medical historical past has been extra scrutinized and documented — by docs, in addition to by loads of armchair specialists in match galleries, dwelling rooms and the information media — over the a long time. However with Woods pursuing his sixth Masters Event title not even 14 months after a automobile wreck made a leg amputation a risk, the 46-year-old golfer’s recuperation routine could also be extra essential than any learn of any inexperienced.
“If he can stroll round right here in 72 holes, he’ll contend,” mentioned Fred {Couples}, the 1992 Masters winner who practiced with Woods earlier than the match opened on Thursday. “He’s too good. He’s too good.”
{Couples} was maybe overly optimistic when he spoke on Monday. Woods shot a spectacular 71 on Thursday and a 74 on Friday to place his rating at one over par headed into the weekend. Taken collectively, the rounds, up and down as they had been, had been outstanding showings of the ferocity and grit that helped Woods to dominate his sport for years. However these pre-cut outings had been anticipated to be the least taxing.
Woods spoke all through the week about how he had little concern for his {golfing} ability, whilst he overtly apprehensive in regards to the put on and tear on a physique that had its best days way back.
So he and his group should spend the hours between rounds making an attempt to realize dueling ambitions: lowering the swelling that comes with traipsing across the topographical nightmare that’s Augusta, and maintaining Woods’s surgically rebuilt limb “cell and warmed up, activated and explosive for the subsequent day,” as he put it.
“Most sports activities, in case you’re not feeling superb, you bought a teammate to go it off to, they usually can type of shoulder the load, or in soccer, in the future per week,” Woods mentioned. “Right here we’ve received 4 straight days, and there’s nobody that’s going to shoulder the load apart from me. I’ve received to determine a option to do it.”
Based on Woods, he has not taken a time off from his rehabilitation efforts since he emerged from the three months in mattress that adopted his one-car wreck close to Los Angeles in February 2021. The crash left him with open fractures of the tibia and the fibula in his proper leg, and it led surgeons so as to add rods, plates and screws to his leg.
The following restoration has required trade-offs and gambles and, in one thing that’s not new for Woods, unshakable confidence in his personal abilities, thrown off as they could be.
Some modifications seem considerably simpler to simply accept than others, like new sneakers to assist with stability on the course. However specialists have additionally developed protocols for earlier than and after rounds — “after I’m going forward and break it on the market, they go forward and restore it at night time,” Woods mentioned on Friday — which have dramatically expanded the timeline that comes with taking part in.
These approaches, which can stretch for hours, have left Woods with much less time for, say, hitting a thousand balls a day and refining, once more, the nuances of his recreation.
“It will get agonizing and teasing due to easy issues that I’d usually simply go do that will take now a pair hours right here and a pair hours there to prep after which wind down,” he mentioned. “So, exercise time, to do what I need to do, it provides extra time on each side of it.”
The aim, he has mentioned, was to construct up the stamina that powered him and each different winner at Augusta, to present sufficient aid to make aggressive golf extra of a risk than a pipe dream.
However the methods can solely uninteresting, not extinguish, the ache, which Woods mentioned is current “every day.”
He insists, although, that ache shouldn’t be an issue. By his account, he didn’t have any sudden bodily setbacks in his first days again at Augusta.
The query for Woods — and for everybody else left standing within the subject at Augusta — is how lengthy a leg already refashioned can maintain up below such protracted duress. The course, lengthened this 12 months, now stands at 7,510 yards, the longest within the historical past of the match, which was first performed in 1934. Woods’s predictions have solely gone up to now.
“I anticipated to be sore and never really feel my greatest, for certain,” Woods mentioned on Friday. “It’s the mixture. I can stroll this golf course — I can placed on tennis sneakers and go for a stroll, that’s not an issue. However going ballistically at pictures and hitting shot shapes off of uneven lies, that places an entire new problem to it.”
He quickly trudged off, presumably for an additional night time of ice.
