Next After The Knee

Counting Dubai, Woods won four consecutive times to open 2008. "A lot of it was due to Tiger changing his swing after he tore his ACL, to take the pressure off the knee," says his caddie, Steve Williams. "He really made a conscious effort to shorten his swing a little bit and tried to keep everything a little quieter through the ball. He ended up hitting the ball more consistently than he ever has. Then in the offseason he worked on his short game, kept hitting the ball just as well, and came back even better. I thought the venues for the major championships were particularly to his liking, and I really believed 2008 was going to be a huge year."

For Woods, his standard of play was the fruition of all the work he had done with Haney since 2004. "All the things that Hank and I had been working on over the years were starting to take shape," he says. "The only thing missing was getting the proper leg action, and that was because of my knee. But I finally felt like I started to understand my golf swing. I could fix it when I was out there playing, could make the adjustments mid-round from shot to shot. I was more consistent day in and day out because of it."

Even in a truncated season, and with Torrey as the exclamation point, the legend grew.

"It all just reinforced the idea that Tiger is something extremely special," says John Cook, a close friend. "People stopped talking about a rival because there isn't one. Maybe the key is his humility. He's never above learning, and he always wants to learn more and do better. At the same time, there's definitely something different about him. Without ever saying so, he knows what his place is. The best golfer ever, for sure. One of the greatest athletes in any game, ever. One of the great humans at anything, ever. He knows his place."

And Woods is fully honoring his gift. He was once seemingly fatalistic about the knee, which he now admits he first injured as a boy daredevil engaged in X-Games-style activities that had nothing to do with golf. In recent years he was lifting heavy, running hard and grunting through military-influenced workouts with Navy Seals he had befriended. Woods still seemed defiant about limitations at his post-victory press conference at the U.S. Open when he said. "I'm not really good at listening to doctors." But now he is.

"What he's told to do, he does it, and he does it at the highest level," says Kleven. "It wasn't always the case, but he's grown up a lot. He's learned that everything the doctors, the trainers and the therapist say is for a reason. On his own, he studies and has a vast knowledge about the injury, the surgery, the rehab. He knows everything about what's been done and what he needs to do."

Woods could be excused for being cavalier when his winning percentage increased after the tear of the ACL. But the resulting instability caused painful cartilage damage, which he chose to clean out after Augusta. His plan was to get through the PGA Championship before having surgery to repair the ACL, but his quad and hamstring atrophied to the point where they could no longer hold off bone-to-bone contact in his knee joint. Trying to cram in preparation for the Memorial Tournament—scheduled as his sole tuneup for the U.S. Open—proved too much.

"I was just practicing at Isleworth, hitting a normal 5-iron," he says. "I felt something kind of give, and it hurt, but I thought, It's just pain. I kept hitting balls, but it kept getting worse and worse and worse. This was a different type of pain. Two days later we had it X-rayed, and they found the cracks."

Woods' stress fractures—what Kleven describes as "little lightning bolts down through the connecting tissue and the cartilage"—were in the left tibia. Kleven says that Woods had so much pathology in his knee that the surfaces of the femur, tibia and fibia were rubbing together. "That's really excruciating pain," he says.

So intense that the week before the U.S. Open, it was difficult for Woods to hit more than two practice shots without having to sit down. Still, he was steadfast about playing at Torrey Pines, the site of his Junior World and Buick Invitational victories.

"I'd never seen him talk about a tournament so much before it started than he did about Torrey Pines," says Williams.

Woods also talked when he got there, buoying himself by repeating two self-fashioned declarations.