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"FacebookPinterest\n\n There were colors in the sycamores on the back side of the Santa Monica Mountains like high autumn in Maine, and a cool swirling breeze worked its way around the Sherwood Country Club, giving the golfers at the Chevron World Challenge fits of indecision. You could publish a coffee-table book filled with images of Tiger Woods in aggrieved postures, swatting at passing leaves and glaring at distant sounds. For the thirteenth year running, he was the host of this unofficial off-season invitational, and all weekend he seemed to feel singularly antagonized by the elements. The book might be called Don't I Deserve Better?\u2014only you wouldn't be able to take your pictures, even if you tried.\n\n On the civilian side of the gallery ropes lining the sixth fairway, I watched with maybe forty other fans as Tiger strode to his ball in the center of the troughed fairway. Trailing him was a security detail of plainclothes heavies with backpacks and earpieces. While Tiger stood in the fairway waiting out the gales, one of them approached and demanded that the fans turn over their cell phones. This big dude\u2014dutiful and jacked and bald as Obama's former body man\u2014handed them each a ticket stub to reclaim their phones after the round. He radioed something, and after an eternity Tiger hit his shot, a ballooning draw that came up short and left in a collection area. Tiger bitched audibly about the wind and then carried on up to the green, where the security canvassed the crowd all over again.\n\n Golf tournaments used to ban cell phones; this one\u2014an unofficial PGA Tour charity jam featuring a field of just eighteen\u2014permitted them. Which is why the gallery wore that same Tiger-patented body frown, a sag of persecution. Many cheered him throughout the weekend; others grumbled with disdain; we all tripped over ourselves to get a look when his presence was felt or heard, sucking inward toward the source like lint to a vacuum cleaner.\n\n Later, along the sixteenth fairway, young swaggerer Nick Watney hacked a punch shot out of creekside rough, winding up in more trouble than where he'd started\u2014and yet as he passed a gaggle of children lining the ropes in front of me, he met their outstretched hands with a grateful swipe of high fives.\n\n \"So great,\" said a man in lime. \"Just like Tiger.\"\n\n \"Are you kidding?\" honked another guy standing nearby. \"Tiger does not do that. Tiger's a dick.\"\n\n On Sunday afternoon, Tiger rolled in a snaky six-footer to claim what several media outlets would call \"his first win in two years.\" Tiger was back, they declared. The drought was over. We'd witnessed the inflection point from which he could at last recast his career and move beyond the personal failures that swelled our breakfast reading two winters ago. None among you will forget the avalanche of raunchy testimonials (porn star, restaurant hostess, Vegas VIP), the forehead-slapping text messages (\"Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own\"), and the frozen helplessness with which Tiger and his team responded to it all. It's been a while, but there was very much a moment, right on the eve of his gutless public apology, when he'd been MIA for two-plus months and sports fans wondered whether he'd ever return to golf. Of course, he did. Not so brilliantly, but still\u2014he was playing. And now\u2026Tiger had won again. He had proven he possessed the physical wellness (he'd recovered from busted leg ligaments) and the talent (the purity of his perfection-training hadn't evaporated overnight), but more important the head strength to seal a victory. He had fid whatever was the matter, marched with a purposeful step in the direction of recovering our good favor.\n\n But as I watched Tiger hole that clincher on Sunday, I couldn't quite share in the bigness of the moment. He'd swung his arm wildly and figured his face into an emphatic sneer, yet he'd beaten only seventeen other golfers, in his own off-season invitational. His reaction was enormous, comically outsize, like a Will Ferrell character after stuffing a third-grader in a shoot-around. Still, there it was: the patented fist pump. Vintage Tiger. Back, baby. \n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Much in Tiger's life has changed since Thanksgiving 2009. While the fallout from his affairs thinned in time to a less consuming presence, he quickly lost many of the sponsors that had made him a rich man\u2014Accenture, ATT, Gatorade\u2014not to mention his wife, full-time rights to his children, and the less financially or emotionally explicit \"trust\" of his fans. He returned with low-level fanfare during the 2010 Masters (a tournament during which any funny business in the crowd would've been identified and erased quicker than a bloody mishap at Disneyland) and, until just this past month, played un-notably on all but a few occasions.\n\n In July of last year, to the surprise of many, Tiger dumped his longtime caddy, Steve Williams. Many figured Williams to be a critical asset to Woods's redemption\u2014someone who had remained above the fray and allegiant. Williams had stood by through the personal trials, waited out the return, and responded to being fired with this: \"I've stuck by him through thick and thin. I've been incredibly loyal. Basically, you could say I've wasted the last two years of my life.\u2026 The timing of it's extraordinary to me.\" Thankless as Tiger seemed, Williams reacted by taking every public opportunity to chip back. When his new boss, Adam Scott, won an event in late summer, Williams proclaimed it to be \"the best win I've ever had\"; later, he reportedly shrugged off the remark at an end-of-season caddy dinner by getting casually racist, saying it \"was my aim to shove it right up that black ass.\"\n\n This came on the heels of Tiger parting with his longtime coach Hank Haney, one of the country's alpha golf instructors. Haney masked the hard feelings, but then last week he published a memoir about his six years with Tiger, The Big Miss. An early excerpt detailed his pupil's reverence for the Navy Seals and claimed that Tiger once considered leaving golf to join their ranks. When a reporter pressed Tiger on the validity of that fairly harmless claim, Woods blew up at him: \"I've already commented on the book. Is that in the book? Is it in the book?\" When informed by the reporter that, um, he actually hadn't commented on it yet, Woods leveled a shearing, silent glare before delivering the icy Tigerism, \"You're a beauty, you know that?\" This was Tiger defaulting into battle mode. If you grasp the weirdness of bristling when someone discloses your respect for the Seals, you can begin to appreciate Tiger's bitterness when former friends overshare.\n\n Since his professional arrival in 1996, the phrase Team Tiger has slipped from reporters' lips with a pejorative snag. Over the years, Team Tiger has been fluidly re-rostered, but it typically included Tiger's late father, Earl; Tiger's superagent, Mark Steinberg; his caddy, coach, wife, and best bros Jerry Chang and Bryon Bell. (Bell, Vanity Fair tells us, seems to have arranged most of the rendezvous in the long, laborious extramarital fuckings-around of Tiger Woods. He'd book the Southwest flight, screen the phone calls\u2026 Think of him as the Turtle in Tiger's entourage.) Team Tiger mortared itself into an arm-linked fortress, and the ruby of rules among the pack was always discretion. Shut your mouth, talk to no one; speak and risk banishment.\n\n Which is why it's so dazzling when figures like Williams and Haney open up. Try as his publicity squad might, it's tough to maintain\u2014or now restore\u2014the Tiger Image when former insiders sprout secret-sharing campaigns. \"It's always a divorce,\" David Feherty, longtime commentator and golf-gab-show host, told me recently. \"Tiger expects the curtains to remain drawn, and when somebody opens them, it pisses him off. He has appeared superhuman for so long, and it's like he feels the need to perpetuate that myth.\"\n\n Which, it should be said, has been the biggest problem with Tiger all along. Even during the soaring years of his infallibility\u2014when his talents were impossible, his true character untested\u2014no one really knew anything about the most recognizable athlete on earth. In the presence of reporters, Tiger seems only on the rarest occasion to have articulated a fully authentic statement. That's common enough. Most athletes undermine the highly interesting things they do in competition by being aggressively uninteresting when pressed to comment; many just don't have it in them. But Tiger was the rare supertalent who we suspected was capable of depth. And yet he actively chose the path of doublespeak. Watch any of a million interviews with him: He listens intently, looks you in the eye, verbalizes plenty of words, says nothing.\n\n Years ago, Sports Illustrated published an exchange Tiger's father said he had with his son at age 3:\n\n \"Where were you born, Tiger?\" Earl says.\n\n \"I was born on December 30, 1975, in Long Beach, California.\"\n\n \"No, Tiger, only answer the question you were asked. It's important to prepare yourself for this. Try again.\"\n\n \"I was born in Long Beach, California.\"\n\n \"Good, Tiger, good.\"\n\n When the secrets expelled themselves from the Tiger bubble like sludge from a sewer pipe, I supposed that something positive could come of it all: I figured Tiger might start speaking more openly. For years, fans yearned to know a broken part of him. Even when his image was unscuffed\u2014possessed of its most bloated moneymaking potential\u2014fans reveled in the cracks. Tiger, it's been known inside the game since his boyhood, has always had one of the dirtiest mouths on Tour. Cursing at every turn, overflowing with middle-school jokes about lesbians, blow jobs, and black penises. (In 1997, GQ published a piece in which many of those dirty jokes were relayed; Tiger chose never to speak with us again. Nine years later, he told one of those very same jokes to a mistress as an ice-breaking pickup line. Almost a decade and no new material.) At the course, people loved to hear Tiger swear. They found it funny when he erupted at camera shutters and picked fights with fluttering leaves. It humanized his extraordinariness. There are scores of YouTube clips devoted to that mouth. Also to Tiger farting.\n\n But when the fissures in Tiger's veneer became faults and their friction brought on a big old global quake, what was left to gain was the clearest picture of the star we'd ever seen. Instead of coming clean, though, and owning up in full to\u2014or maybe even altering\u2014the behavior he'd concealed all along, he has made certain he is less exposed, not more. He's doubled down on the strategy that broke him. The mistake, Tiger seems to believe, was that the secret had gotten out, not that he'd misplayed his power.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Shortly after the win in December, Tiger announced that his first tournament of 2012 wouldn't be the PGA Tour event at San Diego's Torrey Pines\u2014a course on which he'd won at every imaginable level\u2014but rather a little-known European Tour stop in Abu Dhabi. It was an odd choice, but some golf writers justified it as a thoughtful move because \"the expectations won't be as high\" to follow up with another victory. By the time Tiger arrived in Abu Dhabi, we'd glimpsed the reveal: The event had paid him a reported $2.5 million appearance fee, a practice strictly banned in the States.\n\n In Abu Dhabi, he put on a fair show. After two rounds of playing with no great mistakes but few highlights (he blamed his poor putting performance on Thursday on the grain of the greens), Tiger tore through the field on Saturday. Through fifty-four holes, he was tied for the lead with an unknown Brit named Robert Rock.\n\n There were a number of years, enough to be called an unmatchable era, when Tiger won every single tournament in which he held a third-round lead. Part of this dominance was aided by the thumb-sucking meltdowns of his playing partners; when paired with Tiger, opponents put up notably worse scores than they did with anyone else. And these were great players, major-championship contenders. In the past, guys like Robert Rock would stub themselves right out of contention, their intestines were knotted so tightly.\n\n Then Tiger vanished, and by the time he returned, golfers, even (or maybe especially) the young and inexperienced ones, no longer feared him like they had. He was as breakable as any, and his game showed it.\n\n So back to the case of Robert Rock. Late January, I woke up in the middle of the night to watch the final round at Abu Dhabi play out live. Rock, who had started the round tied with Tiger, broke free, but by the turn it looked as though Rock might crumble. The conditions were ripe for Tiger to make his move, and yet he mishandled opportunities and gave away the tournament. There was nothing of the old acceleration through the finish line.\n\n Still, it'd be irresponsible to write off Tiger's potential. He is the most capable golfer of all time, and now that his body seems mostly healthy, there is a great deal of transcendent play left in him. At the Honda Classic in March, the tournament during which he recoiled at the Seals talk, I scrummed along with Tiger's gallery for four days\u2014and on the last, we witnessed the sort of articulate command of his golf shots Tiger hadn't mustered since his return. All week, the Tiger cops spread along the gallery ropes like ill-wishing oil, insisting that phones be pocketed and kicking out those who refused. Even so, at times it seemed half the fans on the course were following Tiger alone, stacked rows deep, like shark teeth, at each tee and green.\n\n \"The affinity that fans have for Tiger has remained strong and they show it in many ways,\" his agent, Mark Steinberg, said in a statement, adding that Woods declined to comment. \"Tiger understands how fortunate he is to have the public's support and has expressed that appreciation often. While some in the media want to harp on the past, it's obvious that the public has moved on.\"\n\n There seems to be plenty of truth to this last bit. When Tiger announced his intentions to play the Honda, sales at the event rose appreciably. And for the first three rounds, the galleries committed to an uncomplicated advocacy. If you asked me to split them into for and against, you'd be left with an empty plot of critics to my left and an army of support to my right, muscled up behind that little blond kid with the TW logo razored into his hair. And all this before Tiger's 62 on Sunday\u2014the lowest final round of his career. Though he still fell short, that thing we'd all suspected was verified: He was surely going to win again.\n\n And then he did. In the manner of the old way\u2014as though bottled and teleported from before the scandal. He beat the field at Bay Hill two weeks ago not by dropping our jaws but by exhibiting a maddening consistency, more in control than anyone else. The win brought an end to a thirty-month drought. He walked off the eighteenth green Sunday to the chorus of his name being cheered as if it were the end of an underdog movie, Rudy or Rocky.\n\n But why was Tiger winning so important to us, anyway? If we accept the whole mirage as we once did, doesn't that make us suckers? What's dishonest about Tiger now is not that he's looking us in the eye and lying; it's that he's asking us to remain complicit in that grand lie of infallibility long after it's been publicly obliterated. Golf is better with Tiger around. And in order to preserve his presence in its most electrifying form, it's tempting to buy what he seems to insist: that he has organically improved, as both person and player, because of what he's been through.\n\n For the duration of his professional career, Tiger accepted our attention, investment, adulation, and trust in a manner that suggested he felt he deserved them. He had, after all, done more than anyone ever to change golf. He had grown our interest in the game by a double-digit exponent, and he had done nothing for years to subvert the untethered heights to which his achievements and global image could soar. (His father, infamously, said that Tiger could do more for humanity than anyone in the history of the world.) We accepted his inhuman qualities as mechanical by-products, behavior we'd put up with in exchange for the robotic precision. When our idea of Tiger Woods was exposed as vaporous, we felt conflicted\u2014or at least this fan did\u2014about Tiger's future success: Did we want him to win again in spite of the duplicity, or to lose as payment for it?\n\n When he ultimately returned, what I think we wanted was a sense that he felt fortunate to be back out there. Blessed, maybe. That even though he had not cheated in competition, it was not his implicit right to be paid millions to indulge in retirement pleasures. That as compared with the rancorous storm of his personal life, the golf course was a reprieve, a place he could love to be.\n\n Instead, Tiger seemed to act more entitled upon his return than he had even during his ascendance. At that first tournament back, the 2010 Masters, it took him just a few days to explode a promise\u2014that he'd try to tone down his negative outbursts\u2014by coming as unthreaded as ever, shouting into a tee-box microphone (\"Tiger Woods, you suck! God dammit!\") to the salivating joy of the Internet. Soon after, he met a question from a reporter\u2014the same guy from the Seals tiff\u2014about his drop in ranking with: \"The good thing is...I might be able to beat you.\" He got into hot water over a report that he'd started dating his former neighbor's daughter, a woman who'd been 9 years old when Tiger first moved in down the street. Jimmy Fallon said that when he and Tiger were fooling with the new TW video game off-air, he suggested that Tiger try some trick; Tiger unsmilingly nipped, \"Don't tell me how to play my game.\" Even when he was grinning wide with NBC's Jimmy Roberts and signing balls for fans after his 62 at the Honda, the takeaway was that only a career-low Sunday could elicit those sorts of niceties.\n\n What we've longed to see these last two years was that he comprehended\u2014and maybe even enjoyed\u2014his good fortune. Which got me thinking: When was the last time Tiger looked beholden on the golf course, overwhelmed with the sense that he'd been dealt an extraordinary hand? You might have to go back to the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open, the first glimpse of the 20-year-old by a national television camera after he turned pro. On Sunday, at the par-3 fourteenth, Tiger holed out with a 6-iron\u2014his first professional ace. One tournament down, one indelible, unexpected lightning bolt of a highlight already chalked up to his legacy. He won just twenty-five hundred bucks that weekend, and yet you can see, in the luck-struck comprehension in his face, that he senses the jet engines pitching from low hum to full throttle. None of us knew anything then, and yet we expected everything. We will never see that look again."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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