No one wants to be the one who burys Tiger Woods in sports, but the truth is that seeing the best golfer of the centurythe best in history if the ability to transform a sport were quantifiablein a version even close to what he once was is increasingly distant, if not impossible.
Tiger Woods, ranking
The Californian, who has suffered nearly thirty serious physical problems throughout his career, recently underwent yet another back surgery, this time to replace a lumbar disc. This same year, in March, he had already undergone surgery due to a ruptured Achilles tendon. The forced decline to which injuries have led a player who, due to his age (49), should still have something to say in the elite of a sport favoring longevity (Phil Mickelson won his last major, the 2021 PGA, at 50), now has a numerical reflection.
Because on the 5th, Tiger Woods dropped out of the top 2,000 in the world rankings. He then fell to 2,001st, and in the latest update, last Monday, he appeared at 2,048th. This is the consequence of the inactivity his ailing body has led to. Since winning the Masters at Augusta in 2019, the triumph that seemed to reignite his pursuit of Nicklaus, from whom six years later he is still separated by three majors (15 to 18), and a few months later winning the Zozo Championship for his 82nd PGA victory (a record only matched by Sam Snead), Tiger has played in 19 official tournaments, none this year.
At that time, he was ranked sixth. Then came the pandemic, his back problems, the car accident in Riviera Maya that nearly cost him a leg... The decline came slowly but surely: at the end of 2020, he was 41st, 566th at the end of 2021, 1,274th at the end of 2022, surprisingly, 887th at the end of 2023, in which he only played two tournaments and retired from one, the Masters, and 1,124th at the end of last year.
And the scenario will be even more disheartening for next April if Woods, as it seems, continues to not compete in events that award points. The statistician known on Twitter as Nosferatu (@vc606) predicts that he would run out of records, and therefore disappear from the table, come the Masters. A tragedy for a golfer who was number one for 683 weeks over 13 years, including 281 consecutive weeks between June 2005 and October 2010. If a ranking delegitimized by the fracture in the system that led to the emergence of the LIV serves any purpose today, it is to attest to the end of an era, the era of the Tiger.
