Next After The Knee

"He's calm and balanced," says Woods' athletic trainer and physical therapist, Keith Kleven, who has known him since the year before Tiger entered Stanford. "The family, the way he talks about the baby and the one on the way [due in February]. He's centered in everything right now, the best I've ever seen him."

Woods concurs. "I've been working so hard on the rehab part of it, it hasn't been hard to forget the golf part," he says. "In a couple of more months, when I'm able to rotate and move on this thing a little more, I'm sure I'll have the itch to come back. But this down time has reconfirmed that I won't have a problem when I have to walk away from the game. It's not going to be that hard."

Of course, Woods has been fortunate to fill any potential void by being an active participant in the most formative period in the life of his daughter, Sam.

"We're all proud of our kids, and I'm no different," he says. "Watching her learn how to talk—yelling at the dogs like I do. We play catch. She's 16 months . . . she'll catch it and throw it right back to me. I wouldn't have seen all this if I had been playing a lot. It's something I talked about with Jay Haas [a father of five]. I told him, 'It's harder to leave home.' He said, 'Wait until they tell you, "Don't leave, Daddy." That kills you.' That's something I'm not looking forward to at all."

At the same time, Woods sees the whole domestic package as a help, not a hindrance, to his golf.

"From what I heard, when I first got engaged I was going to become a worse golfer, and when I married Elin I was going to become a worse golfer. Then after we'd had a kid, I was going to get worse again. But I've become a better golfer with each event. They've all made me a happier person with a more rounded life. All these people who basically said I would lose it because of all these different things, they have no idea."

So, is this injury break another karmic moment in the charmed life of Tiger Woods? A perfectly timed halftime, a long moment to reassess and plan for a career second half that should include passing Nicklaus' 18 majors? Woods sees it as much more pedestrian.

"I just see it as rehab, something a professional athlete has sometimes got to do," he says. "My life changed dramatically when my dad died [in 2006]. To make that adjustment in life, that was hard. Then, after losing my dad, the next year to have Sam—those were polar-opposite experiences. To be as low as I could possibly be, to be as high as I could possibly be, all in one year. If you want to create halves, that was that transition. To have knee surgery, that's easy."

It's not to say that the break won't be beneficial.

"It can only do him good," says instructor Hank Haney. "It takes a tremendous amount of mental energy to do what Tiger does. More than most people can imagine. It's good for him to rest, to visualize, to prepare. On the other hand, he's so good at mind control that he keeps himself from saying he misses it, because that doesn't do him any good."

Woods also has a chance to fuel up for paybacks to skeptics, doomsayers and those who long to see him fail.

"When you have desire like Tiger has, when people write you off and say you're finished, you like that," says Lee Trevino. "I heard that stuff my whole life, and I loved it. Whenever I was in a hospital bed or laid up, my mind would be running, thinking about all the things I was going to do. Tiger's going to come back with a vengeance."

Woods doesn't bite on the payback angle, but when asked if he ever has to fight fears that his best golf has been played, or that he'll never be the same, he says, "I never look at it that way. Anyway, I don't want to be the same—I want to be better."

He has more than ever to build on. It's easy to forget that before his operation, Woods was on his longest ever sustained run of excellence. From last August through the U.S. Open, he won 10 of the 13 events he played, all with an anterior cruciate ligament that ruptured while he was jogging at home the week after the 2007 British Open.