So, to borrow a phrase with a cold political edge, "he hadn't gone away you know". After almost a year of huffing and puffing but failing to blow away the opposition, Tiger Woods used his own tournament, the Target World Challenge, to prove his re-structured swing works.
As runner-up Padraig Harrington observed, "It looks like he's worked on the right things. He seems to really be getting it back."
In fact, for virtually the first time all season, Woods' swing stood up to pressure. It may not have been an official ranking tournament, but with so many big names in the quality field, and with Harrington in the match ahead exerting pressure on the world number two, it provided Woods with the perfect inspiration for the 2005 US Tour season, which is less than a month away.
Woods began reshaping his swing with coach Hank Hainey last spring, but it's only recently he was able to carry on to the course the success he found on the range. He said he didn't trust his swing, but started to believe he was nearly there when he tied for second at the Deutsche Bank (on the US Tour) in the first week of September. Then, the middle two rounds of the Tour Championship, when he shot 64, 65, were proof to him he was nearly where he wanted to be.
"It was frustrating because I knew it was in me. I knew I could do it," he said. "I had to take baby steps all year, but I knew I was working in the right direction. Sometimes it might just have been three or four holes in a round that I played great, and then the rest of it wasn't so good. Eventually it became nine, then 18, then 36, then 54. Now, it's a whole round, and that's exciting," claimed Woods, who had gone through the tour season without a strokeplay win.
Woods' drought, which extended back to the Accenture Matchplay last February, ended when he travelled to Japan last month for the Phoenix Masters. Sunday's win in the World Challenge, which earned him $1.2 million, money he donated to the Tiger Woods Foundation, has confirmed a return to the form that made him the dominant player in the professional game since he turned professional.
Even in a supposedly poor year for Woods, he still finished the year with prize money of $5,819,407 (it would have been closer to $7 million but for the fact he donated Sunday's money to his charity) which left only Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson ahead of him in the worldwide earnings for the year.
For Harrington, it was a case of what might have been as he launched a serious assault on the course. Having started the final round four shots behind third-round leader Colin Montgomerie, the Dubliner wound up with a five-under-par 66 and a bogey-birdie-bogey finish, but still earned $750,000 (bringing his worldwide haul for the year to $3,986,917).
"A win would have been a good Christmas present," admitted Harrington.
Coming down the stretch on Sunday, it was a five-wood approach on the par five 16th that proved Harrington's undoing. "I didn't hit a good shot and paid the price for it," said Harrington. The shot went into a hazard from where he attempted to play a recovery shot, only for the ball to cross the green into a bush from where he had to play out left-handed with the clubface turned. "I played all right."
Still, it was a good ending to Harrington's year which saw him finish third in the Volvo Order of Merit and, at the tail-end of the season, follow on from a tied-third place finish with Paul McGinley in the World Cup in Spain and a runner-up finish to Miguel Angel Jimenez in the Hong Kong Open.
For now, though, the world number six enters into a winter's hibernation of sorts; although an immediate aim of his is to launch his own charitable foundation in Dublin tomorrow.
