All eyes are on Tiger Woods this week. The Tiger is back in action, which is a cause for celebration after his withdrawal from the last Masters after making the cut due to ankle problems that forced him to undergo surgery. But there is another player returning to competition in this Hero World Challenge, a tournament sponsored by Woods that takes place in the Bahamas with only 20 golfers in the fray: Will Zalatoris.
The Texan also had to abandon in Augusta, but minutes before the first stroke due to a back injury that has been tormenting him for over a year. He was operated on and now reappears with renewed spirits, the one who was seventh in the world ranking (today he is 33rd). Zalatoris took advantage of Tiger’s wise advice about his physical ailment to plan his return to competition.
“It’s been an interesting seven months. A golfer’s worst nightmare is feeling his back fail on the Augusta practice field 30 minutes before tee time,” describes Will from the Bahamas, where he will play tomorrow alongside Jordan Spieth. “It’s been a game of patience, hard work. I received a lot of really good advice from guys who have had to go through the same thing and they all told me to take my time, that no one has recovered from such an injury too soon,” he reveals.
Zalatoris also comments that only in the last few months has he been able to hit balls again. “I think I really started hitting balls a couple of months ago. Really each week I’ve improved a little bit progressively. I had a strict amount of time of how much I could train. I had to spend a lot of time in rehab, basically six days a week. You know, that’s how it’s been: now I know a lot more about anatomy than I think I ever wanted to know, but I feel really good right now,” he celebrates.
“I had the goal of playing this fall, but in my opinion it was too soon to know where I was,” says Zalatoris, who thought about returning in the RSM Classic and was glad he didn’t due to bad weather. “The first five or six weeks were probably the hardest,” said the runner-up of the Masters, the PGA Championship and the US Open, who was told from the beginning that recovery after surgery is complicated from a mental point of view. “I would say the hardest part from the beginning was not having a schedule,” he maintains.
Among those who gave him advice was none other than Tiger, who underwent multiple back surgeries performed by the same doctor. Zalatoris had a conversation with Woods in September at the Nexus Cup and he gave him some valuable ideas. “He really asked me more questions than I could answer. They were really stimulating,” points out Will; “so now, instead of just watching videos of my swing from the front, I do it from the back and see how my back is and how I move.” Woods also advised Zalatoris not to change “who I am as a golfer or my swing, but simply redefine things until they are a bit simpler.”
Of course, these tips demonstrate Tiger’s involvement with young golfers who are coming on strong. And Zalatoris can only have words of gratitude with the legend of world golf, especially after rising from his ashes time and again after serious physical ailments: “It’s brutal, there’s no other way to say it. What he’s doing and what has happened with his body, especially to come back and win another Major after everything that happened. This was the first time I underwent any kind of surgery in my whole life and went through that recovery process. The fact that he has had to go through so many things and is still as good as he is, even when he is over 40, still being able to go out and play in Majors is… there are no words to express it, just put it on the list of remarkable things this guy has done in his career,” he concludes.
