Tiger Woods completed a comeback from personal and professional adversity on Sunday, capturing his fifth Masters title and his 15th major tournament with a victory that snapped a decade-long championship drought and instantly returned him to the top of the sports world.
It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a come-from-behind victory for a player who had had so much go wrong on the course and off after his personal life began to come apart on Thanksgiving night in 2009.
As such, it was only fitting that after he walked off the 18th hole on Sunday, his one-stroke victory secure, his path to the official scoring office was gridlocked with well-wishers, including many of the golfers he vanquished over four grueling days at Augusta National Golf Club.
Woods triumphed in almost stoic fashion, playing with shrewdness and determination over the final stretch of holes while the other players who were grouped with him on the leaderboard took turns succumbing to the pressure of trying to win the Masters.
And although Woods did bogey the final hole, he did so with a two-stroke lead, victory in sight and the knowledge that he could give one of those strokes back and still win the tournament.
Only when he tapped in his final putt did Woods let loose with a joyous shout that revealed how much the victory meant to him.
At 43, Woods became the second-oldest winner of the Masters, behind Jack Nicklaus, who won here in 1986 at age 46 and who holds the record for victories in major tournaments, 18. And Woods’s victory immediately reverberated beyond golf and, for that matter, sports.
The win even led to a rare moment of agreement between President Trump and former President Barack Obama. “What a fantastic life comeback for a really great guy!’’ the President said on Twitter. “To come back and win the Masters after all the highs and lows is a testament to excellence, grit and determination,’’ Obama posted.
Woods’s victory had an epic feel to it. At Augusta, on perhaps the sport’s biggest stage, was its seminal figure, suddenly back on top, which is where he was a decade ago when everything suddenly went sideways for him.
What followed was a long, painful period of his life, in which his body repeatedly broke down and his marriage collapsed. But after prevailing on Sunday, Woods is back in the pantheon of the sports world’s biggest stars, back on a level with LeBron James, Serena Williams and Lionel Messi, back in a space he entered with his first Masters victory in 1997, when he was a skinny 21-year-old a year removed from Stanford who declared “Hello World” in a classic Nike commercial.
“It’s unreal for me to experience this,’’ Woods said in a television interview after his victory on Sunday. “It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”
The long drought Woods endured between major championships — his previous one came at the 2008 United States Open — would have once seemed inconceivable. The same could be said for the 14 years it took for Woods to finally win his fifth title at Augusta National, a course so suited for his game that Nicklaus once predicted that Woods would collect more than the combined 10 Masters titles that he and Arnold Palmer won there.
And yet there was an eerie familiarity to what took place on Sunday. Woods played his final round before crowds that were 10 to 12 deep for hundreds of yards at every hole — from tee box to green.
In a sense, though, the gallery that really mattered to Woods was much smaller and consisted of his mother, Kultida, and his two children — his 10-year-old son, Charlie Axel, and his 11-year-old daughter, Sam Alexis. His children were among the first to greet him once his triumph was complete. Neither had been born when Woods basically ruled the sport.
Source: The New York Times
