'It’s almost miraculous.' Spinal surgeons were just as awed by Woods's Masters victory as everyone else — possibly more so.
By Adam Kilgore Adam Kilgore Reporter covering national sports Email Bio Follow April 16 at 6:00 AM In April 2017, Tiger Woods announced he had undergone the fourth operation on his back in a little more than two years. At the time, Woods had not played in a major tournament in more than 18 months. Back spasms and related pain shooting through his leg had made it difficult for him to play with his two children or sit long enough to eat dinner at a restaurant.
“It’s almost miraculous,” said Jack Zigler, president of the International Society for the Advancement of Spinal Surgery. “On the one hand, you have somebody who’s in great physical condition and extremely well motivated — it’s the ideal patient. But on the other hand, he’s going back to an unbelievable level of function. The likelihood you could ever get back there is small.”Before Woods, the chances may have been nonexistent.
“I get people back to golfing, but these are amateur golfers that want to play once or twice a week,” Banco said. “This is a guy competing at the highest [level] four days in a row. It is remarkable that he did it. That’s all I can say: It’s absolutely remarkable. I would have never given him a chance.”
Why try multiple discectomies if ALIF is what saved Woods’s career? Those initial operations, experts said, were not mistakes. ALIF is considered a more drastic measure, with less chance of allowing a top-level golfer to return to his best form. “If you are going to have single-level fusion, the bottom level is the best place for it to occur,” Guyer said in a statement on Woods’s website announcing the procedure in 2017. “Some individuals are born with one less vertebrae, which would be similar to someone who had a single-level fusion.” The surgery can be described through each letter of the acronym.
The vertebrae are grafted together with a substance from outside the body. In the early days, a surgeon would have used a piece of bone taken from the patient’s pelvis for the graft. It worked great but also meant a longer recovery — sometimes a weeks-long hospital stay. “You look at his swing speeds, [and] you got to worry about the longevity of the next level of his spine,” Hah said. “As I look at it, I would say there is some concern there.”
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