On Sunday afternoon, Tiger rolled in a snaky six-footer to claim what several media outlets would call "his first win in two years." Tiger was back, they declared. The drought was over. We'd witnessed the inflection point from which he could at last recast his career and move beyond the personal failures that swelled our breakfast reading two winters ago. None among you will forget the avalanche of raunchy testimonials (porn star, restaurant hostess, Vegas VIP), the forehead-slapping text messages ("Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own"), and the frozen helplessness with which Tiger and his team responded to it all. It's been a while, but there was very much a moment, right on the eve of his gutless public apology, when he'd been MIA for two-plus months and sports fans wondered whether he'd ever return to golf. Of course, he did. Not so brilliantly, but still—he was playing. And now…Tiger had won again. He had proven he possessed the physical wellness (he'd recovered from busted leg ligaments) and the talent (the purity of his perfection-training hadn't evaporated overnight), but more important the head strength to seal a victory. He had fid whatever was the matter, marched with a purposeful step in the direction of recovering our good favor.

But as I watched Tiger hole that clincher on Sunday, I couldn't quite share in the bigness of the moment. He'd swung his arm wildly and figured his face into an emphatic sneer, yet he'd beaten only seventeen other golfers, in his own off-season invitational. His reaction was enormous, comically outsize, like a Will Ferrell character after stuffing a third-grader in a shoot-around. Still, there it was: the patented fist pump. Vintage Tiger. _Back, baby. _

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Much in Tiger's life has changed since Thanksgiving 2009. While the fallout from his affairs thinned in time to a less consuming presence, he quickly lost many of the sponsors that had made him a rich man—Accenture, ATT, Gatorade—not to mention his wife, full-time rights to his children, and the less financially or emotionally explicit "trust" of his fans. He returned with low-level fanfare during the 2010 Masters (a tournament during which any funny business in the crowd would've been identified and erased quicker than a bloody mishap at Disneyland) and, until just this past month, played un-notably on all but a few occasions.

In July of last year, to the surprise of many, Tiger dumped his longtime caddy, Steve Williams. Many figured Williams to be a critical asset to Woods's redemption—someone who had remained above the fray and allegiant. Williams had stood by through the personal trials, waited out the return, and responded to being fired with this: "I've stuck by him through thick and thin. I've been incredibly loyal. Basically, you could say I've wasted the last two years of my life.… The timing of it's extraordinary to me." Thankless as Tiger seemed, Williams reacted by taking every public opportunity to chip back. When his new boss, Adam Scott, won an event in late summer, Williams proclaimed it to be "the best win I've ever had"; later, he reportedly shrugged off the remark at an end-of-season caddy dinner by getting casually racist, saying it "was my aim to shove it right up that black ass."

This came on the heels of Tiger parting with his longtime coach Hank Haney, one of the country's alpha golf instructors. Haney masked the hard feelings, but then last week he published a memoir about his six years with Tiger, The Big Miss. An early excerpt detailed his pupil's reverence for the Navy Seals and claimed that Tiger once considered leaving golf to join their ranks. When a reporter pressed Tiger on the validity of that fairly harmless claim, Woods blew up at him: "I've already commented on the book. Is that in the book? Is it in the book?" When informed by the reporter that, um, he actually hadn't commented on it yet, Woods leveled a shearing, silent glare before delivering the icy Tigerism, "You're a beauty, you know that?" This was Tiger defaulting into battle mode. If you grasp the weirdness of bristling when someone discloses your respect for the Seals, you can begin to appreciate Tiger's bitterness when former friends overshare.