Another attempted comeback won’t salvage Tiger Woods’s legacy

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Over the past decade, Tiger Woods has had eight "comebacks," if that is still the right word for them.

It started when he was still in his prime with his knees. Then his personal life went all to hell. After that, the problem spread upward. His neck got a hold of him. Then his back. And his back again. And again.

After a while, he was taking entire seasons off to have his body gone over by a team of surgeons, Six Million Dollar Man-style.

At this point, Woods is no longer a golfer. He's a science project.

Each time Woods returns, the storyline plays out in familiar ways. He tells everyone he's a new man, happier now, settled and pain-free.

He's finally got things back on track (a subtle nod to rehab).

He doesn't have expectations, as such (i.e. he has a bunch of expectations).

He only knows that he's got unfinished business (as though a professional sports career were meant to continue until you drop dead in the midst of your backswing).

Despite knowing that the repeated screwing together of your bendable parts is not conducive to high-level athletic performance, the golf world continues to treat Woods's return as if he's had a miracle cure. There's so much magical thinking in this sport, its chief correspondent ought to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

All of these doomed career reboots used to feel like Woods's fault. He could not find a way to leave with grace and simply accept his spot in the sport's holy trinity, alongside Nicklaus and Palmer. Long ago, the repeated returns began to feel grasping.

Now it's starting to seem as though it's everyone else's fault. If people would stop wishing for Woods to try again, maybe he could find a way to move on.

Woods's latest resurgence (given the way the previous few have gone, it's probably more of a surgence) kicked off Thursday at his own tournament, the Hero World Challenge.

The tournament is neither heroic nor much of a challenge. A few years ago, Jordan Spieth won it with a 26-under. In 2016, Woods finished 15th of 17. He played once more in January and then took the year off.

Nevertheless, Woods's first-day playing partner, Justin Thomas, captured the general euphoria.

Thomas, a fresh face from the American heartland, was the best player on Tour last year. He could be an aspirant to become the new Woods, but for a few deficiencies. He's already too old (24), too bland and too like what golf used to be – a sport for plutocrats and the out-of-touch.

For as long as U.S. President Donald Trump is making it his real full-time job, golf cannot be anywhere near as cool as Woods briefly made it. It's moving in the other direction.

Thomas doesn't get that. He's still young and full of hope. The last time Woods won a major, Thomas had just started high school.

Asked by reporters this week why everyone was so stoked to see Woods return, Thomas said, "The same reason, you now, when Michael Jordan came back to basketball."

Presumably, Thomas is referring to the first of Jordan's comebacks (the one from baseball) and not the second (the one from boredom). On the Woodsian scale, Jordan, 54, still has a couple of comeback mulligans left.

Thomas said a lot of other nice, star-struck things about Woods's place in the game as a builder and icon. The spiel had a eulogistic tone, as though Woods were 71 instead of 41, and possibly dead instead of alive.

Thomas ended with this: "I'm also looking forward to trying to kick his ass, to be perfectly honest."

Can you imagine anyone saying that about Woods 10 years ago? They would not have dared. When he was at his best, competitors were afraid to invoke Woods's name, never mind speak dismissively of him.

It would have been like dipping your arm in sheep's blood and then hanging it over the side of the boat on a cruise down the Amazon River. You couldn't be sure how, where or when you were going to lose the limb, but you could say for sure that it was going to happen.

Nowadays, Woods laughs that stuff off. He's just happy to be back with the guys, any sort of guys. He's so out of touch that he didn't realize anyone would care when he took in an off-day round with Trump the other day.

Does Woods read the papers? Does he have no sense of his place in the world, and in what made him the most famous face on the planet?

It wasn't his chipping. It was what he represented – hope, change and limitless possibility. For a moment, he was a one-man avatar of the American Dream (those good ol' days feel a long time ago).

Now, it's like the guy lives in a vacuum-sealed tube, and that his only exposure to the outside world is on the driving range.

If Woods's real goal in all this is securing his legacy, in moving people's mental image of him beyond the Escalade wreck, cocktail waitresses and that mugshot, how could he so badly misjudge what his career has really meant?

It isn't as a golfer that Woods was going to be primarily remembered. It was as his generation's Muhammad Ali.

That's out the window now, whether or not he wins another Masters.

All he has left is the golf. That's the problem. Perhaps it's the only thing he's ever got real positive reinforcement for.

So he was back out there Thursday, no longer what he once was, but instead a reconstructed Frankenstein's monster that vaguely resembles the player we once knew as Tiger Woods.

Shortly after noon, one sports site pushed out an alert message – "Tiger finds fairway with opening tee shot in return to competitive golf."

That's where Woods's competence baseline is now – he found a fairway.

History suggests it's unlikely he can keep that going for long. History further suggests that Woods ought to have long ago started thinking a little harder about history.