It will be a long time before Tiger Woods can claim to be back in the old routine, but now that he is practising again after his self-imposed exile, there is a greater likelihood that the world’s No 1 golfer is preparing for a return to the game.
Woods has been seen hitting balls on the practice ground close to his home in Isleworth, Florida, and while it is thought improbable that he will be ready, or willing, to play at the WGC-CA Championship at Doral, Miami, next week, there is a possibility that he could tee it up again before the month is out.
According to Associated Press reports, Woods has just returned from a week in Arizona where he and his wife, Elin, were believed to have had marriage counselling. It is the second stage of his rehabilitation — the first involved a 45-day stay in a “sex therapy clinic” in Mississippi — after he had admitted to a string of extramarital affairs.
Woods announced an indefinite break from the game on December 4 in an attempt, he said, to save a marriage he had shaken to the core. And when he made a very public apology from the headquarters of the PGA Tour, at Sawgrass, Florida, just under two weeks ago, it seemed that a return to competition was the farthest thing from his mind. Now, according to a source close to the Woods camp, he is getting back into a routine that includes golf and fitness.
“I do plan to return to golf one day, I just don’t know when that day will be,” Woods had said. “I don’t rule out that it will be this year.” To judge from his words and his body language that day at Sawgrass, it looked possible that he might not play again this season. And yet it is the game that defines him and at some point he knows that he will need to get back to some kind of normality, whatever that is.
Assuming that Woods’s therapy has gone to plan, he should be free to start playing again when he feels the time is right. And if he is determined to play at the Masters in the second week of April — a championship he has won four times — he would do well to get in some competitive action.
The Tavistock Cup — a behind-closed-doors, made-for-TV, private match between the Isleworth and Lake Nona golf clubs on March 22-23 — looks increasingly attractive and would offer him the chance to reacquaint himself with some of his peers. Then, later that week, he could go on to defend his title at the Arnold Palmer Invitational just down the road in Orlando.
As with all things connected with Woods at present, the speculation is little more than educated guesswork.
His handlers are answerable only to him and, as with political spin doctors, snippets of news are leaked under the cloak of anonymity as a way of preparing the ground ahead. But whichever way he plays it, Woods is guaranteed a media scrum when he returns to action. His stage-managed reappearance a fortnight ago satisfied nobody. The quicker he gets on with it, the better for him.
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