DRIVE

There’s perseverance. Then there’s Tiger Woods perseverance.

By Sports Illustrated writer Harig’s account, Woods single-handedly changed the game of golf—a child prodigy who is three major championships behind Jack Nicklaus and tied in the number of PGA titles with Sam Snead, to say nothing of having amassed unprecedented earnings. “Woods transformed the game,” writes the author, “turning golf geeks into keen observers, casual golf fans into ardent followers, and even indifferent sports fans into curiosity mavens.” Moreover, Woods racked up many of his stats while playing through intense pain: a fused disk, multiple bone fractures after his notorious 2021 auto accident, and so forth. Just a year after that near catastrophe, Harig notes, Woods was back at the Masters and the PGA Championship, dropping out only to undergo more surgeries. The psychology behind this drive is complex, but it involves putting aside pain and fear and pushing oneself beyond what would seem to be insurmountable limits. There’s also some grace involved: Whereas Woods was cocky and to some extent aggressive in his youth, by the time he hit his 40s, he was “a more modest, appreciative player who had come to embrace the younger generation of golfers who idolized him when they were growing up.” It’s noteworthy, Harig writes, that Woods returned after so much medical work. Countless golfers have had to endure back surgeries over the years, “but few have had surgery that dealt with the spine and returned to any high level of success.” Woods isn’t immortal or infallible, to be sure, but he’s admirable for playing through one malady after another, from a trick knee that he waited a decade to fix to the microdiscectomy that threatened to ground him for a season.

A solid portrait of an athlete’s lonely progress in battling pain, the yips, aging, and other obstacles.