When will Tiger Woods return from injury? No one can resist golf's great guessing game, not those who watch it, write about it or, it seems, play it.
"He'll let us know," said Padraig Harrington on the eve of the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, the golf course where, famously, the world No1 dragged his sorry leg around for 91 holes until he won the 2008 US Open and then departed the scene for an indeterminate time. "And when he does know he will tell us something different anyway."
The Irishman, winner of two major championships in Woods' absence, is a world-class golfer and, clearly, a shrewd observer of human nature. Woods is famous yet unknowable, a fierce protector of his own privacy and someone who understands better than any marketing man that the less people know the more they want to know.
Yet being the most famous athlete on earth comes with certain duties, one of which is to keep his adoring public "informed" of his progress as he gets ready to return from the knee surgery that has kept him out of competitive golf for eight months. His latest bulletin was published on the PGA Tour's website last week and, like those that have gone before, it was long on generalities and short on the specifics of his return.
"A lot depends on the baby, which is due pretty soon. That takes precedence over anything I do golf-wise. But I must admit, I am also excited about returning to competition," Woods wrote. "Early on, I didn't miss golf because I knew I wasn't physically able to play. The truth is, I would have embarrassed myself. Now, I'm getting my feel and practice back. It's just a matter of playing more on the course.
"A lot of people have come up to me and said they really miss me playing, and it's great to have that kind of support. People have been incredibly nice during my lay-off and I honestly appreciate it. I'm working hard to get myself back into tournament shape and will return as soon as I'm ready."
But when will Woods be ready? Obviously, only he knows the answer, although rumours emanating from Isleworth, the up-market golf community in Florida he has made his home for the past decade, suggest that he is practising endlessly, as well as playing 18 holes a day in an effort to restore his "scoring muscles". "I played a few rounds with him a couple of weeks ago and I can tell you this – he is good to go," his friend Mark O'Meara says.
If so, and assuming the birth of his second child comes quickly and goes smoothly, then Woods has several options when it comes to choosing a venue for his return. The least likely is that he will enter the Northern Trust Open at the Riveria Country Club in Los Angeles, which starts on 19 February. The tournament is played on a course he has known since boyhood, against what will be one of the strongest fields on the PGA Tour this year. More to the point, it is a tournament he has never won.
No doubt his advisers can think of at least one alternative. The week after Los Angeles, golf's great circus rolls into Tucson for the first World Golf Championship event of the year, the World Matchplay, a tournament sponsored by the financial services company Accenture, which reportedly pays Woods $7m a year to act as its pitch man. That is a lot of money, even by his standards, and, having already lost his $9m-a-year contract with the struggling American car manufacturer Buick, he might feel inclined to cement his relationship with Accenture by giving the company the gift of hosting his comeback, and thereby benefiting from the worldwide publicity it is bound to attract.
Some of those who know Woods best believe he will do exactly this, although that would be to make the mistake of assuming his principal motivation is finance. It is not, and it never has been. He will do what is best for his long-term career, which leads others to argue he will be back at the CA Championship, which starts at the Doral Club in Miami on 12 March. For one thing, the venue is closer to his home, and for another he has won the tournament three times in the past four years. It offers both convenience and his very best chance of securing what would be a statement victory.
"I think Tiger will come back in Florida," O'Meara said at the tail end of last year, only to seemingly change his mind last week, hinting that Woods might choose to travel to Tucson, where he won last year. "Tiger hasn't made a definite commitment about when he'll be back, even to his close friends, but he does like to go back and defend wherever possible."
If Woods' friend and frequent playing partner is unsure, then the rest of the golfing world might be better advised to stop speculating and stick to certainties surrounding the his absence from the game, the most obvious of which is that it is almost impossible to overstate how much he has been missed.
That much has been clear to those who have been around Torrey Pines for the past few days to witness a tournament that is an copy of the event that Woods has made his own, winning it for the past four years in succession. Ticket sales are down 20 per cent according to tournament director Tom Wilson, and corporate hospitality has dropped significantly because of the bad financial climate. "Even those companies who are still doing well in this economy have cut back on hospitality because they feel it is not the time to be seen doing it, with so many people losing their jobs right now," he says.
Desperate times require desperate measures, and despite Woods' absence Wilson has used Tiger's image in all of the event's marketing material. His face adorns the front of the tournament programme, as well as newspaper adverts, some of them published after the world No1 failed to meet the deadline for entering the event – a decision that has led to murmurings about false advertising.
"People can have their own opinions but from our point of view it is very costly to change a newspaper advert and like everyone else we needed to save money," says Wilson. If he sounds unrepentant, he also sounds unconvincing, although there is plenty of sympathy around Torrey Pines for the besieged tournament director as he tries to sell the sport of professional golf in the absence of its most saleable figure. Everyone knows that Tiger Woods can't come back soon enough.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
