Tiger had been playing with a severely compromised ACL for years. Back in 2002, at the time of his first knee surgery, doctors told him that only about 20 percent of the thick ligament connecting the thighbone and shinbone of his left leg remained intact. After playing for nearly five years on what amounted to borrowed time, Tiger felt something go in his knee in July 2007. But he chose not to tell anyone that he was hurting. His thought process was consistent with that of other elite athletes who try to play through pain: There’s a difference between being hurt and being injured. If I’m hurt, I can deal with pain. Pain is no big deal. I can block that out. But when I’m injured, my body doesn’t respond. In other words, as long as he could still compete and win, Tiger determined that he wasn’t injured. He looked at his situation as if through a straw, focusing solely on the here and now.
With his body breaking down and his personal life in turmoil, Woods maintained a single-minded approach to competition, playing some of the best golf of his life. He started the 2008 PGA Tour season the same way he had ended the ’07 season: winning. He won the first three tournaments he entered—the Buick Invitational, the WGC–Accenture Match Play Championship, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational. But with each tournament, the pain in his knee intensified. By the time he got to the 2008 Masters, he admitted to Hank Haney that he was hurting. At the same time, he had no intention of stopping.
“Nothing that some drugs can’t take care of,” he told Haney. “I’m fine.”
The first reported instance of Tiger using painkillers during a tournament was in 2002, when he experienced constant aching in his knee. By 2008, the pain was more severe, and, according to his trainer, Woods used Vicodin at the 2008 Masters to manage the extreme pain in his left knee. He finished in second place at Augusta, just three strokes behind the winner, an amazing achievement given the grave condition of his ACL. But he would have won easily if his putting hadn’t been so uncharacteristically off. Putting, more than any other aspect of golf, is a function of touch and feel—both of which can be compromised by pain medication.
Two days after leaving Augusta, Tiger underwent knee surgery in Park City, Utah. “I made the decision to deal with the pain and schedule the surgery for after the Masters,” Woods announced on his website. “The upside is that I have been through this process before and know how to handle it. I look forward to working through the rehabilitation process and getting back to action as quickly as I can.”
But the surgery didn’t go quite as planned. Orthopedic surgeons Thomas Rosenberg and Vern Cooley, who had operated on Tiger’s left ACL in 2002, intended to clean up some of the damaged cartilage around his knee. It should have been a fairly simple procedure that would have alleviated pain and enabled Woods to return to the Tour in time for the US Open seven weeks later. But after scoping his knee, they made a surprising discovery: Tiger’s ACL was completely torn, meaning he needed ACL ligament replacement surgery.
From a medical standpoint, it was hard to reconcile the condition of Tiger’s knee with his performance. He had won nine of his previous twelve tournaments, and he’d done it with a severely compromised left knee. In the three tournaments he didn’t win during that stretch, he’d finished second twice and fifth once. To put this in context, during this period, Tiger was winning more frequently than he had in 2000, when he turned in the greatest season in golf history, or in 2006 when he played the finest golf of his career.
Rosenberg’s instinct was to reconstruct Tiger’s ACL while the knee was open. But Woods was unconscious and had consented only to having loose cartilage removed from his left knee joint. The more extensive reconstruction procedure would force him to miss the remaining three major championships, and Rosenberg wasn’t about to do it without Tiger’s okay. So he left the shredded ACL alone, choosing instead to clean up the cartilage as best he could. It was a stopgap measure that would potentially enable Woods to play through the summer.
Possessing an extremely high tolerance for pain, Tiger had been able to play for approximately nine months without an ACL thanks in large part to the unusually strong muscles he had built up around his knee. Those muscles were a by-product of his weight-lifting routine. But in the aftermath of his surgery in April, those muscles naturally weakened, compromising the only remaining support around the knee. Swelling, soreness, and stiffness set in. Nevertheless, with his sights set on returning to the PGA Tour at the Memorial Tournament on May 26, Tiger resumed hitting balls in mid-May.
While practicing one day at Isleworth, he felt a crack just below his left knee. Two days later, Haney showed up in Orlando. That night—Sunday, May 18, 2008—Tiger and Elin had Haney over for dinner. When Tiger got up from the table, he immediately stopped and bent over, grimacing with his eyes closed. Worried, Haney and Elin looked at each other.
“I’m fine,” Tiger said.
“Tiger, you can’t even walk,” Haney said. “How are you going to be able to play?”
The next day Woods was limping so badly that he decided to withdraw from the Memorial and undergo an MRI. Days later, Dr. Rosenberg and a colleague flew out from Utah to go over the results. The mood was grim as Tiger and Haney sat on a couch in Tiger’s living room while Rosenberg pulled up images on his laptop and pointed to two dark lines on the screen. Tiger’s left tibia, he explained, had two stress fractures right below the knee.
Silent, Tiger stared blankly at the fracture lines. The 2008 US Open was just two weeks away, at Torrey Pines Golf Course in La Jolla, California. Chiseled out of the coastal cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean, Torrey Pines boasted panoramic views and breathtaking vistas. For the average golfer, it was a paradise. But Tour pros saw Torrey for what it was at the time—two scenic municipal courses owned by the city of San Diego, one, the North course, that annually ranked among their least favorites to play. Tiger, however, loved Torrey for its wide fairways and the fact that it had virtually no out-of-bounds. At age fifteen he’d won a Junior World title there. He’d since won six PGA Tour events at the course, including four in a row from 2005 to 2008, when he opened the season by winning the Buick Invitational. And from the moment the 2008 season began, he had fixated on playing there in the US Open, more so than on the Masters or any other tournament. He wanted to win on what he considered his home course in front of fans who cheered his every move.
But a fractured tibia on top of a ruptured ACL seemed to foreclose any hope of collecting another major, prompting Haney to inquire about the standard treatment for stress fractures.
Six weeks on crutches, Rosenberg said, followed by a month of rehab.
The math was clear: Tiger’s season was over. Ten weeks out of action meant he would miss the British Open and the PGA Championship too.
Tiger finally spoke up: “I’m playing in the US Open. And I’m going to win it.”
His voice was defiant, and Rosenberg wasn’t about to challenge him. “Tiger, you can try to play,” he said. “There’s not too much more damage you can do at this point. It’s just a matter of how much pain you can take.”
“It’s just pain,” Woods said, bending over to put on his golf shoes. “C’mon, Hank. Let’s go practice.”
Earl Woods once described Tiger as the first golfer who was a “true athlete.” Those words, in Tiger’s mind, meant tough, strong, and accustomed to dealing with pain the way football and basketball players did—which is to say, by ignoring it.
“That’s just what we do as athletes and competitors,” Tiger said. “You have to deal with it. But it’s trying to get up every day and knowing you have to go into the gym and bust your butt, and it’s going to hurt, and you’re going to put yourself in a different place, a different state of mind. For me, I enjoyed that part of it.”
On the Saturday before US Open week, Woods played nine holes with Haney at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach. It was, by any measure, a disaster. Wearing a bulky leg brace that looked like something you would expect to see on an offensive lineman, Woods couldn’t rotate his lower body. As a result, he sprayed shots all over the course—into the rough, over fences, into hazards. After nine holes, he actually ran out of balls. The brace was throwing off the mechanics of his swing.
“I can’t play with this thing,” he told Haney in frustration.
On Rosenberg’s orders, Tiger had been wearing the brace for weeks. But he decided to play the final nine holes at Big Canyon without it. Haney figured that the pain of playing without the brace would finally persuade Tiger that his goal of participating in the US Open simply wasn’t realistic. But he underestimated Tiger’s determination.
Without the brace, Tiger limped noticeably when he walked, but his swing improved. Although the pain level went up a few ticks, the challenge of playing with a severe physical limitation seemed to invigorate him. Over the next few days, his game got a little better with each practice session. But the more time he spent on the golf course, the more the swelling increased around the stress fractures. The stiffness was getting worse too. His physical therapist worked on him before and after each practice session, but Tiger refused to take prescription pain medication, as he had done at the Masters. He would take nothing other than Motrin or Advil to help combat the swelling, and he was determined to fight through the pain.
The PGA Tour’s new drug-testing policy was set to go into effect on July 1, 2008. Sometime between the end of the 2008 Masters and the start of the US Open, Woods had his blood drawn and tested in what he told Hank Haney was a precaution against the supplements he was taking. “That’s the way he framed it,” Haney said in a 2017 interview. “ ‘They’re going to start testing me. You can get all kinds of false positives.’ At one point he said, ‘Motrin can give you a false positive for marijuana. I’ve got to make sure none of these supplements I’m taking have anything in them.’ And then he took the [blood] test and said everything came back all fine.”
The Open would be played solely on the South Course at Torrey Pines. At 7,628 yards, it was the longest in major championship history—toughened by gnarly Open-length rough, pesky bunkers, and multitiered greens. For the first time, the USGA had used the World Golf Rankings for pairings, which meant Woods, Mickelson, and Adam Scott—ranked one, two, and three in the world—would be grouped together on Thursday and Friday. Mickelson and Scott knew that Tiger was coming back from knee surgery, but no one outside of Woods’s inner circle and his medical team knew that his ACL was ruptured and that his tibia was fractured in two places. Tiger wanted it that way. Mickelson and Scott, in his mind, were soft. Not real athletes. There was no way either of them would ever think about playing with a broken leg and no ACL. No other golfer would.
“Tiger knew he was climbing the biggest mountain of his career at Torrey Pines,” said Haney. “And it inspired him to an incredible achievement.”
Over four spectacularly uneven days, Woods showcased the utter genius of his game, particularly his putting. Wayward drives that led to four double bogeys were overshadowed by three astounding eagles, including a sixty-five-foot downhill racer from the fringe when he really needed it on Saturday; bogeys countered by birdies; an ugly 38 on the first nine on Friday reversed by a lights-out 30 on the back; and every single day, when it counted, a barrage of gut-wrenching putts for par.
Woods held a one-shot lead over Lee Westwood and was two clear of Rocco Mediate going into Sunday. In his thirteen previous wins at major championships, Woods had never lost a major when leading after three rounds. But with three holes to play, he found himself in uncharted waters—down one to Mediate, a journeyman pro 147 spots below him in the world rankings. Westwood was still in the hunt but about to fall victim to the Tiger Effect. Everyone else within striking distance had already succumbed to the same illness, what one longtime Tour regular loosely described as a bad case of nerves and a shrinking ball sack. “That was the week when guys were so petrified of Tiger,” the insider said. “Nobody had the nuts to get ahead of him that week.”
Nobody but Rocco Mediate. With one critical putt to go, Mediate was holding his breath and a one-stroke lead at one under par, watching on television outside the scorer’s shack as Woods lined up a treacherous fifteen-foot putt for birdie.
Tiger was fifteen feet away because Steve Williams had the nuts to put his job on the line. Woods had flared his second shot to the par 5 eighteenth hole into the right rough—96 yards from the green, 101 from the hole. Woods wanted to hit a fifty-six-degree sand wedge. But given the lie and Tiger’s pumped-up demeanor, Williams argued for a full sixty-degree wedge, and backed the call with everything he had.
“Tiger, you have to absolutely trust me on this one,” Williams said. “And if I’m wrong, fire me. I know how much this means to you, so if I’m wrong, just fire me.”
Williams wasn’t wrong. The shot landed about twenty feet past the hole on the right and trickled back down the slope, leaving Woods a chance for birdie to tie Mediate and force a playoff. The putt was a lot tougher than it looked. If Woods hit it too high, it would stay high. If he got it too low, it would fall off. Basically, he needed his putt to ride a ridge.
Adding to the stakes: it was late in the day, the greens were bumpy, and the ball was resting on one of the worst parts of the green. Woods told himself, Two and a half balls outside on the right. It’s going to break late. Make a pure stroke and stay committed. So he hit it.
The putt ran the ridgeline like its life depended on it, then took a sharp left and banged into the right side of the cup. Instead of lipping out, it rattled in. Amid a roar that was heard by the hang gliders hovering over the Pacific a mile away, Tiger thrust his fists into the air and then slapped hands with Williams, the agonizing pain in his leg eclipsed by the adrenaline rush. Woods and Mediate were headed to an eighteen-hole playoff on Monday.
“Unbelievable,” Mediate said to himself as he watched Woods celebrating on the monitor.
As soon as Tiger left the course, euphoria gave way to worry. He had geared himself up to play seventy-two holes, not ninety. His knee and leg felt like they had been hit with a thousand hammers. He spent the night with his physical therapist and told himself he would have to dig deeper than ever to make it through eighteen holes the next day.
During Monday’s playoff round, Nike ran an ad featuring Earl Woods, as if he were speaking to Tiger from the grave. “Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life,” he said. Very few people knew just how tough he would need to be that day.
For the longest time, Monday’s playoff looked like a replay of the day before: all square through fourteen holes. Throughout the day, Woods resembled an aging prizefighter—knocked to his knees by pain for one swing after another, only to rise to his feet and continue to fight. It was sporting drama of the highest order. Tiger trailed by one as he and Mediate stepped to the tee at the par 5 eighteenth. And just as in Sunday’s round, the best Mediate could do was par, leaving Woods a short birdie putt to force only the third sudden-death playoff in the US Open since 1954.
And that’s when Mediate, a real fan favorite, finally faltered. A way-ward drive on the first playoff hole at the par 4 seventh left him in an awkward lie in a fairway bunker leading to a dead pull left of the green. The best Mediate could do was a bogey 5, opening the door for Woods.
Tiger stuck a 9-iron in the center of the green from 157 yards way and two-putted for par and his third US Open Championship.
Walking gingerly off the green, he got into a golf cart with Elin. At that moment, despite a damaged knee and a fractured tibia, the future never looked brighter for Woods. He was on “the other side” now, as he liked to call it, a father for the first time. At every opportunity he talked about how he and “E” were a team in raising their daughter, Sam. Earlier in the year, Sam had crawled for the first time. Now she was walking, dragging a cut-down club around the house. This win at Torrey Pines could not have meant more. “It’s probably the greatest tournament I’ve ever had,” said Tiger.
At thirty-two, he had won his fourteenth major, a milestone Nicklaus didn’t reach until he was thirty-five. Tiger was on a trajectory to annihilate all of golf’s records. The next day in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks called Woods “the exemplar of mental discipline” and declared that he “had risen above mere human status and become an embodiment of immortal existence.”
At that moment, it would have been unthinkable—preposterous—to predict that the US Open at Torrey Pines would be the final major championship in the career of Tiger Woods.