He ran the idea by his wife, Kim, who did not share his enthusiasm. She talked him out of it.
But Johnson could not let go of the idea. Upon arriving at Hazeltine in September, Johnson sought second, third — even 11th — opinions. His teammates’ responses were overwhelmingly positive.
So Johnson ordered more than a dozen of the shirts and had them shipped express to Minnesota, where the players unveiled them during a team meeting after the first day of competition. There they stood, 12 strong, with “Make Tiger Woods Great Again” written across their chests.
Woods, a 14-time major champion, could not play because of a bad back that had sidelined him for more than a year and threatened his career. But his selfless work as an assistant captain played a significant role in the United States’ resounding victory over Europe.
In the weeks, and months, before the Ryder Cup, Woods had gone above and beyond what was required of him to help the team. And now it was the team’s turn to do whatever it could to help him get back on the course. The T-shirts were just the start of a campaign that gained momentum last week when Woods teed it up in the Hero World Challenge, the unofficial PGA Tour event that he hosts.
In returning to competition, Woods, who turns 41 this month, is having to make up the blueprint as he goes. No former No. 1 player has been sidelined from competition for more than a year at Woods’s age and returned to resume his winning ways.
So where does Woods turn for inspiration? To the tennis player Juan Martín del Potro, a one-time United States Open champion whose four wrist operations cost him two years of his career and who started 2016 ranked 1,041st in the world and ended it by leading Argentina to its first Davis Cup title?
To his longtime friend and practice partner Derek Jeter, the retired Yankees shortstop who broke his left ankle when he was in his late 30s, returned too soon and reinjured it, costing him parts of two seasons?
Woods seemed as surprised as anyone by his answer.
“It’s hard to fathom how many of the players here have really — have rallied and really tried to help me come back and offered any kind of advice, any kind of help, whether it’s with equipment, it’s playing, it’s getting out and going out to dinner, just being part of the tour and part of the fraternity,” Woods said.
He added, “I’ve had a lot more close friends out here than I thought.”
It was hard to get close to Woods in his prime when he was winning tournaments by eight or nine strokes. Dustin Johnson, a Ryder Cup teammate whose partner, Paulina Gretzky, is the daughter of the hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky, was asked who he was more intimidated to meet for the first time, Gretzky or Woods. He pondered the question for several seconds, then said, “Probably Tiger, for sure.”
Johnson explained that the first time he met Woods was when they played in the same group in a tournament.
“Yeah, that was definitely more intimidating,” he said. “Wayne’s way too nice.”
Henrik Stenson, the reigning British Open champion from Sweden, played 10 events on the PGA Tour for the first time in 2006, a year when Woods won eight of his 15 starts. Woods, he said, was “always very much into his own bubble.”
“Certainly there would be a big reason for that as well,” Stenson said. “If you stop and talk to everyone, if you’re signing everything, it’s just impossible to do that.”