Tiger Woods has undergone a microdiscectomy to relieve nerve pain in his lower back and will not be competing in next week’s Open Farmers Insurance Open or Genesis Invitational next month.
Through Woods’ Twitter account, it was announced that “he had recently undergone a microdiscectomy procedure to remove a fragment of a pressure disc that was pinching his nerve after experiencing discomfort after the PNC Championship.”
Woods is no stranger to the procedure. He did it three times: once in the spring of 2014 and twice in the fall of 2015. Finally, he had a more serious operation called spinal fusion in April 2017 that prevented him from doing a golf club for six months. .
He returned from that surgery in 2018 and won the Tour Championship that year, followed by the Masters in 2019 and the Zozo Championship later that year.
Woods, 45, struggled for most of 2020 and sometimes complained of stiffness and back pain.
After tying the ninth at the Farmers Insurance Open a year ago, he was never on the verge of playing the eight tournaments he played the rest of the year. He finished in a tie for 38 at the Masters in November.
The PNC Championship is the 36-hole event he played last month with his 11-year-old son, Charlie.
“I look forward to starting training and going back to the Tour,” Woods said in the statement, which also acknowledged that it would not compete in either of the two tournaments in California that were expected to be played.
When Woods did the first return procedure on March 31, 2014, he returned to competition in June of that year, although many believed it was too early. He returned to the procedure in September 2015 and then six weeks later.