Sun still rises for Tiger Woods but dreams of glory have long since faded

TThe sun rose at 6:58 a.m. in Augusta on Sunday, more than three hours after Tiger Woods. Across town, people slept and shared exactly the same kind of dreams, about the view through the pines along the first fairway, the shots over the water at Amen Corner, the long walk uphill to the 18th green, where club president Fred Ridley and last year’s champion Jon Rahm were ready with that freshly pressed green jacket. Woods says he still has these thoughts himself, in the few hours of rest he gets between warming up for the evening and warming up again in the morning. For him it is a sixth victory and a share of Jack Nicklaus’ record.

Only a handful of people who harbored these thoughts had a chance to actually realize them. In Woods’ 29 years of playing here, no one was more than six shots off the lead on Sunday. Which meant you probably already had to be at least one under to have the slightest chance of overtaking third-lap leader Scottie Scheffler.

You had to scroll much further down the morning leaderboard to find Woods, well past Adam Schenk, level, and Akshay Bhatia at five over, and JT Poston, another two shots further back, and Eric Cole, 10 over, until you found him, right next to Denny McCarthy, Tom Kim and Wood’s playing partner for the day, Neal Shipley, a 23-year-old student from Pittsburgh who qualified by finishing second in the US Amateur at Cherry Hills last year. “We came here this morning and saw Tiger at the shooting range, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is really happening,’” Shipley said later.

It is real. And more. Shipley beat Woods inside out. He scored 73 to Woods’s 77. Woods was left 16, dead last and four shots back of the amateur. Every year he is asked here if he really believes he can win the tournament, and every year the answer is the same. “If everything comes together, I think I can get one more,” he said this week. “I haven’t gotten to the point yet where I don’t think I can do it.”

And when Michael Jordan turned 50, he was still studying Lebron James’ game on TV and thinking about how exactly he would take him down if they went head-to-head.

Since Woods’ car accident in February 2021, he has played 10 competitive rounds at Augusta and broken par once. That was when he first returned and he made 71 in the opening round in 2022. Since then his record here has been 74, 78, 78, 74, 73, withdrawn, withdrawn, 73, 72, 82 and 77, with an average weekend score of 78.75. The truth is that after five microdiscectomies on his back, multiple knee surgeries and a subtalar fusion in his ankle, his body can’t carry him through four days of competitive tournament play, nor up and down the fairways of Augusta National.

Woods played 23 holes on Friday, then went out again 20 hours later and made 82, with eight bogeys and two doubles. It was the worst round he’s ever had at a major, and on the course he knows better than anyone where his knowledge of how putts break and what risks to take gives him an edge over everyone else. On Sunday he watched Kim score 66, and later said it was exactly the kind of score he was hoping for. “I thought I had it in my system.” Instead, he made three bogeys and a triple on the 5th, ultimately hitting three drives after cutting the first of them deep into the trees.

The gallery still cheered for him, but it was a warmer, softer kind of Sunday roar, courtesy of all he has accomplished over the years. He may be the only person here who is oblivious to the fact that he is essentially playing practice golf. Everyone else is happy just to catch a glimpse of him swinging a club, even if he’s using it to hit a chip rolling down past his feet, as he did on the fourth green. And the times he catches one cleanly, as he did with his 360-yard drive on the 2nd, people just enjoy the old thrill and the flickering thought of “maybe, just maybe…” But no.

There are compensations. Even Woods seemed to enjoy bits and pieces of his round. He brought his son Charlie to the practice range. He’s 15 and offered his dad some swing tips, which made Tiger smile. Around the 16th, Woods paused his round to shake hands with commentator Verne Lundquist, who is retiring after working here for 40 years. It was Lundquist who called when Woods famously chipped on 16 in 2005. “In your life!” Lundquist shouted. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” We didn’t have Verne, no. And while Woods says he’ll play in the other three majors this season and be here again next year, it looks like we never will again.