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Woods wins tenth PGA Player of the Year award, looks to 2010 for major success
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Tiger Woods was awarded his 10th PGA Player of the Year title following
a 2009 campaign that saw a return from surgery and six wins (Photo AP)
The PGA of America named Tiger Woods its Player of the Year on Tuesday, marking the tenth time Woods has earned the honors. The win nearly wraps up a 2009 campaign that has seen the most dominant force in golf return from major knee surgery to win everything but the kitchen sink. Or a major.
The Player of the Year Award is points-based, taking into account number of wins, placement on the money list, and adjusted scoring average. Woods lead the Tour in each category, securing the Player of the Year Award by brute force - or rather, brutal consistency.
"This has been one of my most consistent years on the PGA Tour," Woods said on his blog, "I won six times, finished second three times, placed in the top 10 in 14 of 17 starts, contended in three of four majors and had my third-lowest scoring average at 68.05. I don't think anyone could have foreseen that" after coming back from such a lengthy rehabilitation.
The only thing Woods wasn't able to do in his comeback year was win a major, something that no one has let him forget. Coming in to the Presidents Cup, Woods seemed to be showing signs of fatigue - at least in his dealings with the press. Before competition began, Woods made a rare comment about how the press handles him.
"Either way," Woods said, "I play well and it's not enough and I've played poorly and you're not very good. So it is what it is."
Woods sets such high expectations because he makes the impossible happen on a regular basis. Watching Woods play golf it is easy to forget how difficult the sport is, how insane his consistency is. Any other player in PGA Tour history would consider a six-win season to be a career year. 2009 marks the eighth time that Woods has won six or more events in a single year, and six in a year is nowhere near his high-water mark of ten wins set back in 2000.
Part of the problem is that when Woods left us in 2008 to go in for knee surgery, it was after one of his grittiest, most gut-wrenching performances ever. His one-legged win of the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines will forever be remembered as one of his most impressive.
The prevailing logic coming in to 2009 seemed to be, "If Woods can do that on one good leg, just imagine how good he'll be with two good legs!" And while Woods was more consistent off of the tee in 2009, it took the full year for Woods to find a balance between his newfound leg strength and his putting stroke. A major-less 2009 for Woods has been difficult to accept for everyone except the man himself.
"Overall, I'm absolutely thrilled about my PGA Tour season," said Woods. "It's a great year, are you kidding me? Even though I didn't win a major championship, to come back from what I came back from, to have the success I had this year, I don't think anyone would have predicted that, and I'm very proud of that."
Ultimately, how the success of 2009 measures up will depend on how well Woods does over the next couple of years. If he continues on the trajectory he is on, using this majorless year as a springboard to readily best Nicklaus' record of 18 majors, 2009 will forever be seen as the year that got Woods back on track.
It remains to be seen whether or not Woods will win the 2009 PGA Tour Player of the Year award, which is voted on by the players. Only three times in the history of the award has it been given to a player who did not win a major, including Woods in 2003. It is hard to imagine who else the players would vote for, given Woods domination and consistency throughout the year.
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