Woods recovery: "won't be 100% until 2010"

Tiger Woods will return to competitive golf next year despite his knee being "85 percent" ready. He has been urged by leading knee surgeon Lanny L Johnson to delay his recovery until he is fully fit:

"The function of Tiger's knee will be OK in terms of motion and stability within 12 months, but tissue maturation process lags behind function. That side of things will be on-going.

"The person's brain has to adapt to how it feels. It is based on this, and the recovery period of other athletes, that I am guessing that Tiger will need two years. Ernie Els came back after one year when he tore his cruciate ligament in a water-sports accident but, if you look, his scores weren't there for another 12 months."

Woods devilishly stated that leading football players who have this kind of surgery need a full two years to recover but "Luckily, I don't play football".

"The healing process for an ACL is six months,'' Woods stated in a press release for his Chevron World Challenge in December. "No matter what I try to do, I can't speed up that process. That puts me into January. Unfortunately, I can't rotate, I can't practice on that leg until then.

"I believe the stat is after six months, the ACL is 85 percent in strength, and then over the next year-and-a-half, it will gain its 100 percent strength,'' Woods said. "So it's basically a two-year process.''

Will Tiger still be on top when he comes back? The period before his injury was perhaps the hottest streak of his entire career, and essentially winning on one knee has further enhanced his legend.