Tiger Woods: How the Big Cat can get back to World No. 1

Tiger Woods completed the comeback of a lifetime by winning the Masters Tournament in April. Suddenly, reclaiming the top spot in the world ranking seems a lot more realistic, too.

Tiger Woods has done so much more than anybody would have guessed just a year ago. At the start of 2018, he was good, and advancing quickly, but there was still some doubt over one missing thing. He hadn’t won yet, and when it comes to Tiger Woods, winning is all that matters. Fast forward to today, though, and he’s won two of the biggest events in golf, the 2018 TOUR Championship and the 2019 Masters, and there’s really just one question left: can Woods be the No. 1 golfer in the world one more time?

It’s a tough thing to figure out, especially considering all the mathematical questions. But as Tiger said himself years ago: “winning takes care of everything”. So let’s dig in a little bit and think about what it will take to make Woods the best golfer in the world once more.

The Official World Golf Ranking is a semi-complicated formula, assigning various values to different tournaments throughout the year. Things like “World Rating” and “Home Tour Rating” come into play, but you can really boil it all down to one thing. Playing in the biggest events of the year, specifically majors and WGC events, does great things for a player. Winning them? Well, that’s even better.

One year ago today, Tiger Woods was ranked 92nd in the world, having just finished tied for 55th place at the Wells Fargo Championship. It was a strong field, but not as strong as THE PLAYERS the following week. Woods finished T-11 at TPC Sawgrass last year, and he jumped 12 spots to No. 80. Considering he started his year ranked 668th after the Hero World Challenge, that was quite the jump.

Woods made his way up to No. 50 at the Open Championship with a tie for sixth, then jumped all the way to 26th with his runner-up effort at the PGA Championship. His win at East Lake in the TOUR Championship sent him from 21st to 13th. Then he hovered right around the same place until his breakthrough at Augusta, where he jumped into the top ten for the first time since March of 2014.

Of course, you’ll notice that the ascent got noticeably slower for Woods in recent weeks. Despite five top-25 finishes in six points-awarding events, Woods only really rose when he won the Masters. It seems like he should be moving a lot faster, but his problem now is the same as it would have been a decade ago: when you’re that high in the rankings, you’re not beating many players ranked higher than yourself.

This is where things get really fun. There’s a chance that Tiger Woods could end up on top of the world rankings again as early as this week at the PGA Championship. The math, surprisingly enough, is even kind of simple. If Woods wins at Bethpage, current No. 1 Dustin Johnson finishes outside the top ten, and neither No. 2 Justin Rose nor No. 3 Brooks Koepka finish second, Woods would vault all three – as well as current No. 4 Rory McIlroy and No. 5 Justin Thomas – to claim the throne once again.

It’s a title he held for 683 weeks during the prime of his career, when his mere presence at tournaments changed the way his competitors played, most of the time for the worse. I’m not saying it’s going to happen this week – that simple math is a lot harder at any tournament, much less a major championship. But much like Tiger’s comeback victory at the TOUR Championship and his 15th major at the Masters…suddenly this is a feeling a lot less crazy, isn’t it?

Tiger has acknowledged that he’ll be playing less in the coming weeks and months (hey, we could hope), but it’s a safe bet that when we do see him in action, it’ll be against elite fields, with tons of world ranking points on the line. And at the pace he’s been going, seeing Tiger Woods on top of the world again could come a lot sooner than any of us ever could have expected.