Photo Courtesy: Omar Rawlings
Tiger Woods’ fall from the top golfer the PGA Tour had seen in a quite awhile continued with the recent news of a back injury sidelining him.
His latest withdrawal from the Farmer’s Insurance Open just adds to what has been a very rough and trying last couple of years for Woods. He has had more time spent recovering from surgeries and injury than being on the golf course, fine tuning his game for upcoming tournaments.
This was suppose to be a year in which Woods would make a comeback of sorts and be able to regularly play in these tournaments, not having to worry about nursing any sort of injury or nagging pain. He might not have returned to the level he once regularly played at and won major after major on the tour, but it would be one where he could be in contention if he could put together a few decent rounds of golf and be there within striking distance of the leader on Sunday.
Now age could have something to do with his bad luck when it comes to playing time but the rash of different injuries just signals the breakdown to a degree of his body, just like with any other athlete in sports who reaches a certain mark in their career. Mentally Woods is still that same fiery player that thinks he can go out and win a tournament he enters into but unfortunately the body itself is not as equipped with the tools to make what he thinks in his mind come to reality.
A recent look at the results for the former number one golfer in the world’s last nine PGA Events he has entered is hard to look at to say the least. From the start of the year 2014 up until now, out of those nine events, he has finished only two of them and those finishes were tied for 25th at the 2014 Cadillac Championship and the other finish was even worse when he finished 69th at the 2014 British Open. Those are hardy finishes that we would see from Woods in his glory days but even just finishing tournaments out now is a small victory for himself.
To miss seven of those nine tournaments has really taking a beating to his overall world golf ranking, which continues to slide even further down a hole that will take quite allot of work and good results for Tiger to climb out of and be back to inside the Top 50. He currently is ranked number 56 but with this latest withdrawal he will fall to at least number 59, the lowest rank for him to have since he was just starting out on the tour back in 1996.
Woods could fall even farther down the rankings should he miss some more tournaments like the upcoming Cadillac Championship and Honda Classic in a month’s time. We could be sitting here by the Masters talking about him fighting to stay in the Top 100 in the world, mind boggling to even think about.
The only saving grace for the 14 time major champion is that he can play in The Master, PGA Championship and British Open for a long as he wants since is a former champion at those majors. The US Open still is an option for him since he is a former champion there as well and has an exemption there until 2017 when his ten year exemption will have expired.
Though he is able to play in these major events, watching and seeing the drive to win and win at a high level from Woods, just being in these fields will not be enough to satisfy him. His will to win more majors is still there, it is all about now just how his body will recover from this setback and can he put together a few rounds of golf that could start to right his ship back in the right direction? That is a question that most likely could be answered during the rest of this golf season.
