A caveat, painful though it is to type. Many, if not most, of my predictions about Tiger Woods, over the last 24 years, have been when wrong. And yet: I believe Tiger Woods announced his retirement this week. It’s in the subtext of a press release about a book he is writing. There was no announced publication date for the book. If the publisher, HarperOne, had one, it would have been trumpeted. The guess here is the book will be excellent, and that it will come out on the last Tuesday in April in 2022, after the Masters and before the PGA Championship, when Woods will be 46. Jack Nicklaus was 46 when he won the 1986 Masters, his 20th and final major, professional and amateur titles combined. You can imagine Woods using the occasion of the book’s release to announce, with a sly nod to Nicklaus and one of his best phrases, that henceforth he will be a “ceremonial golfer.” At a minimum, he’ll have 18 majors himself then, professional and amateur combined. His professional career, the guts of it, will be a nice, neat quarter century.

He’ll keep playing the Masters and some other events, but he will have lowered expectations so much that the numbing pressure on him to win will have largely evaporated. He’ll feel like a new man. The book’s truthfulness will only help him in that regard. It will help his mental and physical health. Book pub dates are traditionally on Tuesdays, hence the nod to Tuesday. Woods would not want the book to come out before the Masters for fear of stealing the tournament’s thunder. The publishers who work with Woods, and particularly his ghostwriter if he has one, may be surprised to learn there is a basic modesty to him. The book, coupled with his new status as a ceremonial golfer, will pave the way for the rest of Woods’s public life, as course architect, team captain and assistant captain and advisor, golfing elder statesman, philanthropist and restaurant owner, all while enjoying the freedom that comes from being unchained from the secrets of one’s past. You can expect Woods to explore his complex feelings for fame, wealth, the game that made him and nearly broke him and made him again, his management team, Augusta National, other players, his caddies, his own body, his drug and alcohol use and the media spying that turned his private life inside out in 2009 and 2010. “This book is my definitive story,” Woods said in the press release. He is now under obligation to make those words true.