It’s happening as we speak on a golf course somewhere in America. A guy stands on a tee, unsheathes his driver, and passes one of those remarks he wouldn’t try on anybody but his pals. “Stand back and let the Big Dog feed,” he says, or something like that. Then he addresses the ball, and rips a three-tiered hook into the swamp thickets. At which point he winces, and clutches at his leg. “I think I have what Tiger has,” he says.
It’s about to become an epidemic: Tiger Knee.
I say this with affection to the golf-obsessed men in my life, from my brother in California to my dear friends Mike and Tony in Bethesda, Md. I say it gently and for your own good: You don’t have what Tiger has. Okay? You just don’t.
Among the many things Tiger Woods established with his towering performance at the U.S. Open, on one good leg, is that even his injuries aren’t commonplace. The question that lingers in the aftermath of those 91 holes on a bum knee, jaw clamped against the pain, is, how on earth did he do this to himself playing golf?
Ordinary recreational players should be advised that they aren’t in any imminent danger of “double stress fractures” or blown anterior cruciate ligaments from the magnificently violent force of their middle-aged downswings. They might have bad knees, or trick knees, or old knees. But it’s almost impossible to incur the injuries that Woods did on the downy fairways of a country club. “What the public should know is this isn’t going to happen to the average golfer,” says Ronald Grelsamer, an orthopedic surgeon at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. “You don’t require multiple procedures as a result of playing golf.”
The fact is, it’s not clear how Tiger himself acquired his galloping case of Tiger Knee. Orthopedists are baffled as to what Woods did to damage his left joint so badly, given that golf is such a static activity. Ordinarily a torn ACL results from an action-sport trauma, not overuse and jogging. Stress fractures come from pounding pavements, not spongy fairways. “To be honest, I’ve never heard of a double stress fracture,” says Grelsamer, “and I’ve been a surgeon for 25 years. So whatever he’s got it’s a little out of ordinary.”
Part of the answer lies in Woods’ personality. He seems to have ground his knee to the nub, out of sheer fanatical dedication. His focus on becoming the best of all time is monocular, and his body never rests, he’s an obsessive runner and weightlifter, and an insomniac to boot. “He trains his — off,” says his agent, Mark Steinberg. There is something forceful and hectic even in the way Woods walks. A couple of years ago, I tried to keep up with him on a swing through town to publicize the AT&T National, the PGA Tour event he hosts every July at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. Woods made a trip to Capitol Hill for a courtesy call on Nancy Pelosi. During the car ride over, he confessed, “I don’t sleep.”
He doesn’t sleep? “I sleep like, four hours a night. I just don’t need that much.”
As we pulled up to the Capitol, I asked him if he had ever been there before. “Nope,” he said, and bolted from the car and up the sidewalk. Strung out behind him were his agent, a press handler, and PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, like the tail of a kite.
Woods charged into the crowded rotunda, briefly titled his head upwards, and took in the ceiling in a single glance. Then he refocused his eyes straight ahead and quickened his pace, cutting across the floor, as his companions broke into a light sprint to keep up with him. From somewhere behind him, someone said, “Hey, Tiger, look at this place.”
“Seen it,” he said, without breaking stride.
So that’s who Tiger Woods is.
Part of the answer to the knee mystery, too, lies in the fact that there has been a good deal of confusion and misinformation about his injuries. The announcement that Woods needs season-ending surgery to repair his ACL came as a dramatic conclusion to his five-day limp around Torrey Pines. But the fact is that a torn ACL isn’t a painful injury, beyond the initial trauma that causes it; Woods’ pain actually came from the stress fractures. It’s not unprecedented for a competitor to play and even win on a torn ACL. It happens more often than audiences realize. “Thousands of athletes have performed with an ACL tear without even knowing it,” Grelsamer says.
In fact, Woods has had the ACL problem for “years,” according to Steinberg. “The word he always uses is that he has a `deficient’ ACL,” Steinberg says. “He has had a deficient ACL for close to a decade. It wasn’t one of those things where you go for a jog and boom it ruptures. It was deteriorating over time and the running he did was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Another misconception, according to Steinberg, is that Woods played against his doctor’s orders. “His doctors didn’t really say unequivocally `You can’t play,’ ” Steinberg says. “They said `You probably shouldn’t play, and if you do, you’ll be in unbelievable pain.’ He’s one of those athletes who, when he hears `probably shouldn’t,’ he hears an opening, and says, `Hey, I’m playing.’ “
The pain Woods experienced from the stress fractures was the real issue, and it was indeed “excruciating,” according to Steinberg. “The world saw pain on Tiger’s face and we probably saw one hundredth of what he was going through.” It was bad enough to take an unnamed medication, “to ease as much pain as possible and at the same time keep his wits about him,” says Steinberg.
It’s those puzzling stress fractures that are the real long-term issue for Woods, not the one-time ACL surgery, which should actually make his knee stronger. Woods is downright secretive about his health, and no one knows the real state of his knee but his orthopedic surgeon, Thomas Rosenberg of Park City, Utah, who refuses to comment. But Grelsamer speculates the unheard-of “double stress fracture” is actually a simple term for a more complicated and chronic bone deterioration that has caused Woods to have multiple operations: he is facing his fourth surgery to clean up the same knee, and he is just 32 years old. “They may have used the word stress fracture because that’s something everyone can understand,” he says. “He’s had a number of arthroscopies, and that makes me suspicious of something that’s ongoing, a bone and cartilage condition that might have been there for a while.”
In a way, the notion that Woods played on a “ruptured” ligament and rose above the agony for one great occasion at Torrey Pines does him a disservice. The real story is perhaps slightly more mundane, but no less epic. Woods has a bad knee, and it’s given him unremitting pain, discomfort, or difficulty, for years now — years, not days. That’s the better measure of his will and mental toughness.
In the months ahead, he faces more pain, though of a different kind. Sitting still is going to be a pain for a man who can’t stand to even walk slowly. He’s the greatest golfer in the world. “But he’s not the greatest patient in the world, I can assure you of that,” Steinberg says.
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