Without Injuries, Could Tiger Woods Have Won 6, 7 or 8 Masters?

Tiger Woods has an amazing record at The Masters. With five victories, he is ahead of every other champion but Jack Nicklaus who has six.

Now, as we prepare for our second COVID Masters, with Tiger Woods injured again, we have to wonder what might have been if he hadn’t had those years with injury that kept him from competing. Could he have won six, seven or even eight?

Woods debuted at the Masters in 1995.  Yes, we know you were thinking 1997.  But Woods played twice as an amateur.  In his first appearance, he was low amateur.  In his second, he missed the cut. Then began a remarkable run of professional play from 1997 through 2020 where his worst finishes were T40 and T38. Unfortunately, in 2021, he will miss his fourth Masters tournament.

Between 1997 and 2020, Woods was in the top 10 nine times out of 21 appearances as a professional.  Adding that to his victories, he was better than 10th fourteen times out of 21.  That’s some kind of performance. Two thirds of the tournaments he played, he was top 10 or better.  And an astonishing 23.8 percent of them, he won.

There were, however, three years when Woods was not able to play.  Could Woods have won them?  Let’s see who the winners and contenders were.  For this year’s champ, we will just have to wait.

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The first Masters Woods missed was 2014, 18 years after his first victory.  In March of that season, he skipped the Arnold Palmer Invitational and announced that he had undergone back surgery. It was the first of what would become seemingly endless back procedures. Instead of Woods thrilling us with booming drives, another long hitter took charge on the “second nine” on Sunday. It provided a different kind of excitement and, as a bonus, showcased a new star.

Bubba Watson, already a green jacket holder, was tied after 54 holes with newcomer  Jordan Spieth, who qualified for the Masters by winning the 2013 John Deere.  And Spieth did not make the final round easy for the veteran.  Watson, meanwhile, demonstrated what his well-known length and new pink driver shaft meant at Augusta National.

On Sunday afternoon, Spieth, rather surprisingly for a rookie, had a two-shot lead by the time he and Watson finished the third hole. But the real change in momentum came at the par-5, eighth.  Spieth three-putted and made bogey there and bogeyed the next hole, the ninth.  Meanwhile Watson birdied both holes and made the turn two shots in the clear. He would not lose his lead again.

In addition to chasing down his second green jacket, Watson hit a memorably long tee shot of 366 yards at the par-5, 13th hole.  Spieth thought it was surely in the trees on the left but quickly found out he was in error. The title and a second green jacket went to Watson.

“I got lucky enough to have two green jackets. It’s amazing to be up here one time to talk. A second time is amazing,” Watson said after winning.

The next missed Masters for Woods was in 2016.  He was sidelined due to his back.  The four-time champ held out hope that he could play until the Friday before the tournament, but he was forced to withdraw.

It was terrible for him, but it certainly opened up opportunities for other golfers.

What happened in 2016, as The Guardian newspaper aptly put it, was a fairy tale tournament for Englishman Danny Willett.  It was also a Steve King-like nightmare for the 2015 champion, Jordan Spieth.

Willett had played solid, steady golf during the first three rounds, but going into the final, he was really not expected to win.  Spieth seemed to have some kind of special magic at Augusta National after his debut in 2014, his victory in 2015 and his position, leading  on Sunday in 2016.  He was playing alongside Smylie Kaufman, one of Spieth’s Bahamas Buddy trip pals, part of the foursome that also included Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler.

Strangely, Willett was not certain he would play that week because his wife was expecting.   However, the fates smiled on him when she, miraculously, had the baby the week prior to the tournament, his ticket to play guilt free.

After the “first nine,” Spieth led by five shots.  But he was about to undergo a meltdown equally as horrible as Greg Norman’s in 1996.  The stake in Spieth’s heart came at the 12th, that nasty but lovely par three.  Spieth made a quadruple bogey there and never recovered. Meanwhile, Willett, playing three groups in front of him, took the lead with birdies at the 13th and 14th,  fired a bogey-free 67 and took home a new green jacket.

Woods also sat out the next year, 2017, and underwent  spinal fusion, in April to fix the pain he had been having.  While Woods couldn’t be there, one of his rivals, Sergio Garcia, was finally able to capture his first major championship, a title that was a long time coming.

Garcia burst onto the US professional golf scene in 1999 when he nearly ran down Woods with a final round charge at Medinah. There was such enthusiasm about Garcia’s performance that the King of Spain called him after he finished his round.

Garcia was 19 then, and the Europeans called him El Nino which means little boy in Spanish.(It’s also the name of a weather phenomenon in the western Pacific Ocean that can bring heavy rain to California in winter months.)

Though Garcia had chances to win majors before 2017, he had been frustrated by being close but not getting over the line.  In 2007, he lost in a playoff with Padraig Harrington at the British Open, and then the next summer at the PGA, Harrington bested him once more.

By then, most people had given up on Garcia actually winning a major championship.  It was just unlikely that he would come out of putting problems that had crept into his game.  It was particularly unlikely that he would succeed at the one tournament where putting is the most important and where the greens are the most treacherous.

As though it was destiny, after 74 starts in majors, after overcoming a regripping yip that began at the 2002 U.S. Open, after having putting yips so bad that he was putting with his eyes closed, on one glorious Sunday in April, Garcia overcame it all.  In 2017,  Sergio Garcia fulfilled his destiny and won the Masters.

While we don’t know if Woods will ever be able to play in the Masters again, his record there is nothing short of extraordinary. Would he have won in 2014, 2016 or 2017 if he had been healthy?  There are some questions that just can’t be answered, but based on his record, there’s a good chance he might have won at least one of them. He won nearly a quarter of the times he played, and that means, counting 2021, it’s likely he would have won one of those years.