How Tiger Woods Went From Being the World's Best Golfer to This Year's Saddest Meme

Tiger Woods was named PGA Golfer of the Year in 2013. So why isn't he making headlines for golfing anymore?

Tiger Woods answers questions at a press conference.
USA Today Sports

Image via USA TODAY Sports/Brian Spurlock

Tiger Woods answers questions at a press conference.

Tiger Woods has been named the PGA Player of the Year a record 11 times since his professional golf career started back in August 1996. He won the award for the first time in 1999 after he beat Sergio García by a stroke at the PGA Championship. Then, he ran off a streak of five straight PGA POY awards before relinquishing the title to Vijay Singh in 2004, only to regain it for three more years between 2005 and 2007. And after Pádraig Harrington won the award in 2008, Tiger won it back again in 2009 before a very public scandal involving his wife, a Cadillac Escalade, and a laundry list of alleged mistresses rocked his world. It completed a decade of total domination for Tiger.

But you could argue that the most important—and maybe most surprising—PGA POY award for Tiger came in 2013 when he managed to put all of the things that happened in his personal life to the side in order to earn back his standing atop the golf world. Tiger didn’t win any majors that year—and he hasn’t won a major since 2008 when he beat Rocco Mediate in a playoff at the U.S. Open, meaning he’s still stuck at 14 majors overall, four behind all-time major leader Jack Nicklaus—but he did record five wins, including a victory at the 2013 Players Championship, to prove that he wasn’t going to let one of the most shocking scandals in sports history end his career. He also regained his No. 1 in the world ranking for the first time since late 2010 after winning the 2013 Arnold Palmer Invitational. And Tiger, who made the cut in all 16 tournaments he entered that year, looked like he was going to be back in the mix on the PGA Tour for years to come.

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But things didn’t pan out that way for Tiger. In 2014, he played in just seven tournaments, missing the cut in two of them, and collected a career-low $108,275, which was significantly less than the $8.5 million he made the previous year in tournament earnings. The following year wasn’t much better, as Tiger played in 11 tournaments in 2015 but missed the cut at five of them and recorded only one top-10 finish. And in 2016, Tiger didn’t play in a single tournament, which helped golfers like Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, and Adam Scott solidify themselves as the best players in the game.

So what happened?

The easy answer is that injuries happened to Tiger. After staying injury-free for the most part during the early years of his career, Tiger underwent reconstructive surgery on the ACL in his left knee in June 2008, which kept him off the golf course for nearly a year. Then, after winning the PGA POY award in 2009, he was sidelined again in May 2010 with what he called a "bad neck" at the time. He played through some pain that season, but in 2011 and 2012, he abruptly left tournaments with knee issues. And while he seemed to return to form in 2013, save for a left elbow strain, the injuries continued to pile up after he won his 11th PGA POY award.

In March 2014, Tiger left the Honda Classic after sustaining back spasms. The following month, he missed the Masters for the first time in his career with a pinched nerve in his back. Back pain also prevented him from participating in events in August 2014, February 2015, and September 2015. And from there, there were more missed Masters and other missed majors, surgeries that were supposed to correct Tiger’s back issues, and a long list of hopeful statements from Tiger on his website that ultimately turned out to be false signs of hope. The injury bug bit Tiger hard after his 2013 season, and it hasn’t stopped biting him ever since. So it’s now been four years since Tiger has recorded a win.

Losing is something that has also, unfortunately, plagued Tiger off the golf course for most of the last four years. Back in 2013, there were many sports fans—us included—celebrating Tiger’s resurrection. It looked like Tiger had put everything that had happened to him in the past behind him and moved on to second act of his storied career.

But as Tiger’s injuries started to mount, so did his frustrations. He started making headlines for dropping F-bombs in the middle of rounds. He started missing cuts that people weren’t accustomed to seeing him miss. And as a result, people seemed to start caring more about the bizarre Twitter beefs he was involved in as opposed to his game.

It was an odd time for Tiger—and it would get even odder. Looking back now, we covered Tiger a lot for golf-related reasons back in 2013 and 2014 when he was trying to take his crown back by transforming himself into pre-scandal Tiger. But around 2015, after Tiger started playing poorly—partly because of injuries and partly because he just seemed like he was pressing  every time he teed off—we more or less stopped caring about whether or not Tiger was going to win and focused instead on all of the extracurriculars that surrounded Tiger.

There was the time everyone thought Tiger had a fake tooth. There was the time Tiger was accused of using PEDs. And of course, there were plenty of times when Tiger’s relationship with ex-girlfriend Lindsey Vonn distracted everyone from everything he was doing on the golf course. But at other times—like when Tiger was accused of cheating on Vonn—it felt like Tiger was never going to be able to fully escape the tabloid lifestyle he had created in light of his 2009 scandal. By early 2016, even Tiger’s old friend Michael Jordan was worried about what he was doing with himself and how he was coping with not being the golf player he once was.

"What does he do every day?" MJ asked in an ESPN The Magazine piece last spring. "I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea. I do not know."

MJ hypothesized that Tiger—or "T-Dub" as he called him—was still struggling to deal with his father Earl Woods' 2006 death. He said that he thought Tiger wanted to erase all of the bad things that had happened to him and that his inability to do that was what was causing him to struggle both on and off the course.

And if that was the case, the same problem seems to plague him in 2017. 2014, 2015, and 2016 were mostly uneventful for Tiger—and caused many people, including us, to wonder whether Tiger was washed. Tiger, who is now 41, has yet to play in a single tournament in 2017 after undergoing the fourth back surgery of his career this spring. In a statement last week, Tiger said he’s looking forward to "getting back to a normal life" and "competing in professional golf and living without the pain I have been battling so long," but it’s hard not to think that Tiger’s best days—or hell even Tiger’s mediocre days, which would likely be good enough to earn him a few more tournament wins—are behind him.

It’s especially hard not to think that when you hear the latest story involving Tiger. He was arrested very early Monday morning near his home in Jupiter, Florida and charged with driving under the influence after police reportedly found him sleeping behind the wheel of his 2015 Mercedes. Tiger was quick to point out that alcohol was not a factor in the DUI, and a police report stemming from the incident seems to back up Tiger’s version of events. According to him, he experienced an adverse reaction to a combination of prescription pills, which left him unable to drive or speak coherently to police. But even if that turns out to be true, how have we gotten to this point where Tiger Woods—once considered one of the greatest athletes of his generation and possibly one of the greatest athletes of all time—has been reduced to the saddest meme of 2017?

Maybe it was all of the injuries and his inability to overcome them that did Tiger in. Maybe it was the scandal that he knew he’d never be able to shake completely. Maybe it was, as MJ suggested, his dad’s death that sent him into a downward spiral that he still hasn’t recovered from. It was likely a combination of all of these things. But whatever the case, it’s amazing to see just how far Tiger has fallen over the last four years after what seemed like the start of a comeback in 2013—and it's hard to imagine him ever getting back to that place again.

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