#pretty sure jason is in a safeway in this image

[junker-town]

What to expect from Tiger Woods in his return at the Farmers Insurance Open

We’ve waited 17 months to see Tiger Woods back on the PGA Tour. Now he’s set to play four times in five weeks. From the best case to the worst case, here’s what to expect at Torrey Pines.

The little hit-and-giggle game last month doesn’t really count. Sure, it was nice to see the Big Cat playing golf back in front of a camera in the Bahamas but this week marks the return of Tiger Woods to the PGA Tour. The Farmers Insurance Open first round on Thursday will come 521 days after his last official round on the PGA Tour, August of 2015’s Wyndham Championship.

This week’s event at Torrey Pines, a place Tiger knows so well and where he’s dominated, does not carry some great weight for Woods. This is not the Masters. But that doesn’t mean we won’t watch and dissect it shot by shot. It’s hard to know what we’ll get from Tiger after such a long layoff, but here we go back-and-forth on some of the best and worst case scenarios (and what it might mean for the future) at Torrey Pines.

Best Case

Kyle: New Cat is same as the Old Cat, and he wins his first real PGA Tour event he’s started since the 2015 Wyndham Championship. With a swing and body reconstructed for the fourth decade of life and freed up from subpar Nike equipment (yes, I said it), Tiger’s primed for more sustainable success than we’ve seen since the Perkins Restaurant & Bakery era. If he’s able to shock the world and win against all odds at Torrey Pines, would you really...

[puts on monocle]

[puts cigar in mouth]

[lights]

expect anything different?

Brendan: That was a highly entertaining revue and best case argument, but here on planet Earth, even the best case scenario cannot be an actual win, right? It’s fantasy, and because it’s Tiger, we might entertain such fantasy more than we’d care to admit with any other player. I think the best case scenario for Tiger is a top 10 finish. Maybe he’s in what we in the golf media like to call “contention,” that constantly malleable term that could mean you’re doing pretty ok out there.

But does that mean he’s going to win? No. The best case would be playing in the third or fourth-to-last tee time on Saturday and Sunday, finishing 8th and under-par, and catching a jet to Dubai in good health for take two.

Tiger’s driver is not reliable yet and this rough, both off the fairway and up around the green, where he’ll have to chip from, is gnarly for such an early season regular PGA Tour stop. Tiger’s been away too long and he’ll get an up-close look right away at what he needs to do to make up ground when he tees off with Jason Day and Dustin Johnson on Thursday afternoon. It may be a little overwhelming to watch those two, No. 1 and No. 3 in the world right now, launch rockets into the La Jolla sky.

The best case is just being around on the weekend and posting a backdoor top 10, while showing NO signs of the chip yips.

Worst Case

Kyle: We’ve seen this go bad before. The last time Tiger teed it up for early season golf in the winter out west, it was a disaster. No good Tiger fan, hater, or biographer will be forgetting his front nine 44 (!) at TPC Scottsdale in 2015. Of course, that was also two years ago. The short game issues that seemed to plague him at that time looked relieved in the Bahamas in December, but there’s far more cameras and attention this week. Can his short game hold up?

Brendan: Yip. Yip. Yip. YIPPPPP. This is the worst case scenario, now and for the rest of Tiger’s career. More than the health issues, the chip yips scare the hell out of me if I am a Tiger fan. There may not have been any sign of them in his start last month at the Hero World Challenge, and he hid them for most of the summer of 2015, when we saw him last.

But the yips are always there, deep down in some dark recess of your golf soul and always capable of popping back up to destroy your golf psyche at any moment. There’s no predicting when they may come back. They may never conspicuously materialize again, but that doesn’t mean they went away.

We often hail Torrey Pines as a course that Tiger has owned throughout his career. It’s one of those handful of venues like Doral, Firestone, Bay Hill, and Muirfield where he’s racked up a majority of those absurd 79 PGA Tour career wins. There are many good memories here, no doubt. But it was also the scene of perhaps the lowest moment of his golf career (note: on the actual course!). After yipping the ball all around the greens in the most embarrassing fashion at TPC Scottsdale in 2015, Tiger showed up a week later at Torrey searching. We saw him hosel rocket ground balls on the Torrey Range under the watch of Pat Perez and Billy Horschel during practice.

He’d yip a few more in his first round just a day later, then withdraw in the middle of it after grimacing in pain throughout. The blame was assigned to some “deactivated glutes,” an all-time Tiger explanation that added to the ignominy of that brief Torrey stay.

The worst-case is obviously something that approximates that last visit to this venue. It can’t be that bad, but it would go something like a missed cut with the continued wildness off the tee and several signs of the chip yips as he tries to play out of some testy lies around these Torrey Pines greens. Even the biggest Tiger cynic or hater shouldn’t want this.

What’s realistic?

Kyle Robbins: Tiger likes the dramatic, and I think after the troubles of early 2015, it would have been too much for his ego to come back too early and suck. He seems to have also reached a point of self-security in life, where he’s far more comfortable off the course than ever before with his new TGR ventures and so forth.

What point am I making? I think if Tiger didn’t feel like he really had it together, he wouldn’t play this week. That’s exactly what he did at the Safeway last October. Now, I think he’s ready.

Though I’m not reading too deep into anything anyone does at Albany, Tiger looked the part at the Hero World Challenge. He may have stumbled at the end and finished near the bottom of a small leaderboard, but isolated doubles & big numbers were mostly the cause.

But the birdies of his stellar third round, his refined swing, his better equipment ... it all leads me to believe making the cut this week is easily attainable, and a Top-15 finish would be a major realistic success.

Brendan: I am with you Kyle on the optimistic side this week (we’ve written too many sad and so very depressing Tiger things in recent years). I took more good than bad away from that week at the Hero. There will be sloppiness off the tee that probably keeps him from actually contending against a field with many of the best players in the world. That will keep some of those double bogeys on his scorecard.

I think Tiger is in a good place, however, and ready to make the cut in his first real PGA Tour event since August of 2015. Given that layoff and the despair of recent years, a made cut is a success. I think he plays the weekend and finishes somewhere between 20-25th at Torrey Pines.

Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images

This first stretch back may mean more for the next 10 years of his career than we realize.

What does this week mean for the future of Tiger’s career?

Brendan: Not much. I think the next five weeks may have a more outsized impact than we think, but this very first week should not matter much for the rest of Tiger’s career, which is hopefully another decade. I think if he has an awful week, there are several easy and understandable reasons to explain it away. Now if the next five weeks, which includes four starts, an uncharacteristically rigorous stretch for Tiger, are a total mess, you worry that Tiger might devolve into the “there is no light at the end of a tunnel” phase we got around this time last year.

Every shot is shown. Every round is analyzed blow-by-blow. No one plays under this microscope. So four bad tournaments in a row becomes a much, much larger burden and seems like four months. Tiger says he never cares what outside “noise” may be surrounding his game, but he has to feel it and knows the scrutiny is intense. This week’s result is not important — you can’t get too discouraged in your first start back. But I do think there is more riding on the stretch that starts now than we may realize.

Kyle: You shouldn’t read too much into January golf. But I think this week could have a huge impact on what remains for Tiger if things go south. The last time Tiger was teeing it up on Tour early in the season, he looked dang-near like a 15-handicapper skulling it to-and-fro across the greens. This week matters for Tiger’s confidence. He needs to know and believe he can still come out and Do It. Something around just above or below the cut line is just fine. Throwing it in the tank and flirting with DFL might have him questioning if it’s worth playing this game anymore.