Missing in Action - Tiger Woods 2009 season

Tiger Woods began the year with a 14-13 majors' lead over his great chum and Nike colleague, Roger Federer. It's now a 14-15 deficit. After Federer lost in five sets to Rafa Nadal in Australia in February, who could see him winning two more Grand Slams in 2009? But he did. When Woods took a two-shot lead into the final round of the USPGA Championship in August, who could see him losing?

But he did.

There have been 17 starts for the great man in 2009, six wins. That's mightily impressive – if you're anybody else. It's mightily frustrating if you're Tiger Woods. He won all four buildup tournaments to the major championships this year (at Bay Hill, Muirfield Village, Congressional and Firestone) but none of the majors that followed. In other words, he did really well in the mocks but relatively flunked his exams.

He lurked around the upper part of the leaderboard at the first two majors but didn't win either. In the Open at Turnberry, he missed the cut – only the second time that had ever occurred to him in a major. At the PGA, the unthinkable happened. He had won all his previous 14 majors after going into the final round with at least a share of the lead, but at Hazeltine he shot a closing 75 and was overtaken by Y.E. (Yong-Eun) Yang, who won by three.

After his victory at the BMW Championship in September, Woods said: “This is one of my best years. There's no doubt about that. I haven't won as many times as I did in 2000 [when it was nine] and I didn't win any majors [then it was three]. But I've never had a year where I've been this consistent, either; this many high finishes in the number of events I've played. There were so many uncertainties at the beginning of the season – I didn't know how the leg was going to respond. To have an opportunity just about every time I tee it up to win the championship... that's something [about which] I can't tell you how proud I am.”

Sound convincing to you? Can you imagine Alex Ferguson declaring he's happy with a trophy less season because Manchester United have scored more goals than any other team in the Premiership?

At the PGA, Woods said he didn't have to win a major this year for it to be a successful one. It was almost, if the notion were not totally preposterous, like he was teeing himself up to fail. Woods latterly has been emphasizing consistency because the alternative is to embrace disappointment.

In some respects, he wants it both ways. He neither wishes nor expects to be judged according to the same criteria as other players, because he knows he is at a superior level to them, but after the season he's just had, recovering from knee surgery or not, he effectively seeks refuge by pointing out that it's been a year that anyone else might sacrifice a limb for.

But his talk, and that of his coach, Hank Haney, had been that once he'd got a reliable knee, he'd come back stronger. Better, even. Mitigating circumstances or not, 2009 was the first year since 2004 that Tiger came up empty-handed in the majors.

The majors are what Woods lives for. For him to win six times in a season and not one of them be a major almost beggars belief. The majors are where his competitive edge is at its sharpest. While he has won 14, of the current players who might win more (with all due deference to Tom Watson) the next best tally is three, held by Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh.

Or is what happened at Hazeltine symptomatic of something deeper? Says one observer close to the Woods camp: “Perhaps the other players aren't afraid of him anymore. He's no longer from Mars. Maybe it's been that way for a while. A lot was made of that stat about him always winning majors when he had the lead going into the last round but, for example, Zach Johnson and Angel Cabrera respectively won the Masters and US Open in 2007 when they were behind Tiger going into Sunday.”

For sure, since he holed that 15-foot putt to tie Rocco Mediate and force a playoff on the final hole of regulation play at the 2008 US Open, since the operation the following week to repair his anterior cruciate ligament, he has not been the overwhelming force he was previously, even if he remains so much better than anyone else. That's especially been the case when he's been under the gun on the greens.

He missed countless putts on the last day of the PGA – just before yet another ten-footer rolled by the cup, at the 17th on Sunday, Nick Faldo in commentary, reflecting on Woods' transparent bemusement, said: “Tiger has never dealt with missing putts.

Look at him.” Nine times that day his ball managed to avoid the drop from inside 15 feet. These were by no means gimmes, but at Firestone the week before he had made an otherworldly 64 of 65 putts from inside ten feet. To read that Tiger took 33 putts when in contention in the final round of a major is the sort of stuff to give fiction a bad name.

That he did at the PGA was somehow all the more astonishing for the fact that the only day he didn't lead after was Sunday. His one-shot lead on Thursday evening was sufficient to convince some folk it was as good as over, a four-shot margin at halfway seemed almost to give him the weekend off (at that point, bookmaker Paddy Power paid out to those who had backed Woods), and even when the lead was trimmed in half by Yang going into Sunday, the widespread perception was that the chances of Woods, the finest front-runner in history, being overhauled were somewhere between none and non-existent.

A fortnight later, he missed a putt from seven feet on the final green that he needed to tie – he thought it was perhaps to win – in the Barclays tournament at Liberty National. “We had it either right-centre with a little pace, or inside right,” said Woods, bemoaning what he categorized as yet another misread. “We missed it by almost a cup.” At least he made Heath Slocum happy.

Likewise Phil Mickelson at the Tour Championship. There Woods held a one-shot lead going into the weekend. He closed with 69-70, one under par, and was comprehensively overhauled by Mickelson, who shot 66-65. “Unfortunately, I didn't putt well and I didn't push him,” Woods admitted afterwards. He hadn't made a birdie on Sunday until the 15th hole. That he won the FedEx Cup by finishing second at East Lake to Phil, his not-best mate, was of cold consolation.

When Woods sank that momentous putt to catch Mediate at Torrey Pines, TV commentator Dan Hicks said: “Expect anything different?” No, we didn't. Not then. But we might begin to now. Woods' fallibility with the putter at Hazeltine was not really a first – it was just the first time he'd been overtaken on Sunday as a consequence. In the US Open at Pinehurst in 2005, for example, he was statistically the second worst putter of those who made the cut, eventually taking 15 more than the winner, Michael Campbell, to whom he lost by two shots.

Of course, you can't be missing every putt if you win a tournament by eight shots, which Tiger did at the BMW Championship, the penultimate event on his 2009 PGA Tour schedule. A 62 on Saturday gave him a seven shot lead and Sunday was largely a parade, not least because his putter was behaving itself. “I didn't change anything,” he said. “I kept telling myself through those [bad] stretches – I was hitting good putts, they just didn't go in. You read the putts better, eventually they'll start going in.”

Elsewhere, too, there was some vintage stuff. As former tour pro, now TV commentator, David Feherty, once said, Tiger keeps on producing magic that wipes out your memories of great shots by other players. Sometimes it seems like he's the only guy hitting them. On the par-five 16th at Firestone in the final round of the Bridgestone Invitational, the same hole where Padraig Harrington drowned his ball and ran up a snowman, Woods converted a one shot deficit to the Irishman into a three-shot advantage by hitting an 8-iron from 178 yards into a near-unplayable pin location and stiffing it for a birdie. On television, Gary McCord noted: “He's supposed to do that. He's No. 1.”

Feherty retorted: “Nobody's supposed to do that.” His caddie, Steve Williams, called the shot “one of his all-time best, considering the circumstances”, while Harrington said it was to “a green I couldn't hold with a lob-wedge”. It is almost certain that Woods will be named the PGA Tour Comeback Player of the Year. After all, following his eight-month absence from the circuit to undergo his knee surgery, he has come back to win six times.

That record means he should surely also be voted Player of the Year. Of the four major winners this year, only Yang has won another tournament in 2009. Other than Woods and Steve Stricker (with three), no one else on the PGA Tour has won more than twice. Incidentally, only in three years that he has been eligible has Woods not been the Player of the Year: 1998 (Mark O'Meara), 2004 (Singh) and 2008 (Harrington).

We may have seen the best of Woods, who is now 33, or we may not. But even if we have, he's likely to remain the game's pre-eminent player for another five years at least. Among other factors, the true impact of the changes governing the configuration of grooves in iron clubs that will be implemented in January won't become apparent until next season gets underway, but at this range one prediction seems safe. Since the amendments are expected to reward shot-making talent and stroke-playing imagination, the odds are heavy that the man they will benefit the most will be the game's premier exponent.

Also next year, the two major Opens return to where they were in 2000 – Pebble Beach and St Andrews. Then Woods won them by a cumulative margin of 23 strokes. Perhaps in 2010 he'll at last win a big one when he doesn't lead on Sunday morning. After all, it was always figured that at least one of the following would happen some day: Tiger would win a major when he didn't hold the 54-hole lead, or he'd fail to win one when he did. I think most people assumed the former would happen first and the latter maybe not at all. It turned out the smart money was not so clever after all.

That's for the near future. As for the recent past, sure, during this season he has returned from surgery and won more tournaments than anyone else. But, per that line from Dan Hicks, we didn't expect anything different. We expected more. We always do. It's simply unusual to find him unable to deliver.