“What is loneliness? Is it having regrets for the things you’ve done? There has to be a rebooting of his life because he’s got decades and decades left. “We all wonder about him, wonder if he’s lonely,” says Tour player Stuart Appleby, a former neighbor in Windermere. Along this stretch of South Beach Road, every house is a fortress, hidden behind tall gates and immaculate foliage. Woods’s spread is on a narrow spit framed by the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian River. By his own admission he kills much of the day playing video games. Woods has retreated to his $60 million compound on Jupiter Island, Fla., a dream house he designed with Elin Nordegren but now inhabits mostly alone after their tabloid divorce in 2010. A more realistic hope is that the world’s 472nd-ranked player will turn up for the champions dinner, another step in his becoming little more than a ceremonial presence in the game. He almost seemed content that he wasn’t going to play again.” By March, Woods was chipping and putting and making easy swings with a 9-iron, but he appears nowhere close to being able to tee it up in next week’s Masters. “I never thought those words would come out of his mouth. “Yeah, I worry about him,” says Steve Stricker, one of the few players on Tour with whom Woods has been close. The tone of resignation sent a shudder through the golf world. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? I don’t know.” Taking stock of his 14 major championships and 79 PGA Tour wins, he added, “I think pretty much everything beyond this will be gravy.” It’s literally just day by day and week by week and time by time. In December, at his tournament in the Bahamas, the Hero World Challenge, Woods said, “There’s really nothing I can look forward to, nothing I can build towards. Woods hasn’t teed it up at a Tour event since last August, and after enduring three back surgeries in 19 months, there is no timetable for his return. Once celebrated for the virtuosity of his short game, Woods was chased from the course last year by a mortifying case of the chip-yips maybe the fittest golfer ever has been betrayed by his body. The most dominant player in history hasn’t claimed a PGA Tour event since 2013 or a major since ’08. These days Woods, 40, draws comparisons not to Jack Nicklaus but rather to a prostrate Willie Mays in the Mets’ outfield.
The sex scandal spawned by that messy night is the line of demarcation in Woods’s career. The wailing of Woods’s mother, Tida, is audible in the background of the frenzied 911 call that followed: “What happened? “ It remains the most vexing question in sports. On Thanksgiving night in 2009, Tiger Woods’s meticulously crafted image was shattered in a single-car accident outside of his home in Windermere, Fla.
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