NEW YORK: One swing, two words and three seconds of a video was all it took from Tiger Woods to get everyone talking Sunday about his future on the golf course.
Woods had not made a public comment about injuries from his Feb. 23 car accident in Los Angeles since May, and he didn’t have a lot to offer on Twitter.
“Making progress,” was all he said, accompanied by the video of a smooth swing with a wedge. Woods was wearing a black compression sleeve on his right leg, with a large bucket half-filled with golf balls on a practice range.
He also had a launch monitor behind him that measures such metrics as distance and ball speed.
Woods was recovering from another back procedure at the start of the year when he ran his SUV over a median and it toppled down a steep hill on a winding, sweeping road in the Los Angeles suburbs on his way to a television shoot a golf course. Doctors said he shattered tibia and fibula bones on his right leg in multiple locations. Those were stabilized by a rod in the tibia. A combination of screws and pins were used to stabilize additional injuries in the ankle and foot.
In an interview published May 27 in Golf Digest, with which Woods has a financial deal, he described the rehabilitation from this surgery as “more painful than anything I have ever experienced.” He said at the time his top priority was “walking on my own.”
He took care of that already, with videos on social media in the last month showing him walking on golf courses during junior events.
Woods has not played since the PNC Championship with his son, Charlie, last December. His last full tournament was the Masters one year ago in November.
It was not clear why Woods posted the video on Sunday. He hosts the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas the week after Thanksgiving.
Woods has had 10 surgeries — four on his left knee, five on his lower back and the most recent for the crushing injuries from the car accident in February. He turns 46 on Dec. 30.
He won a third U.S. Open in 2008 while competing on shredded ligaments in his left knee and a double stress fracture, and he returned from fusion surgery on his lower spine in 2017 by winning a fifth Masters in 2019.
His last victory was the Zozo Championship in Japan in the fall of 2019, giving him 82 for his career on the PGA Tour to tie Sam Snead for the all-time record.
