Chris Park / AP

Tiger Woods will have to battle rust as well as a tough course when he returns to action this week.

We’re not talking about moments and minutes here, if Tiger were to win at Torrey Pines. We’re talking about four days and 72 holes and 20 hours on the course by a guy who hasn’t walked a course or played a single competitive hole in two months, a guy who just a week ago was saying his repaired knee still wasn’t 100 percent.

When he’s healthy, Woods wins around 30 percent of the majors. Like a great hitter, he fails seven times out of 10. When he’s healthy, we blithely pronounce him the prohibitive favorite to win every time he tees it up, and that’s not fair to the competition, let alone the most difficult game ever invented.

Even now, there are people who think he should be considered a favorite at Torrey Pines because of all the times he’s won there before. But that was on a course that wasn’t stretched to more than 7,600 yards, a course that had rough you could actually play out of.

Two years ago, after two rounds of 76 at Winged Foot, Woods was 12 over par. And Winged Foot isn’t as long as Torrey Pines. It also doesn’t have canyons filled with inescapable brush lining the fairways and surrounding greens. At Torrey Pines, players will actually lose golf balls.

To even mention Woods as a possible winner shows an appalling lack of understanding of what the game demands. Not when he’s been rehabbing a knee for eight weeks. There are guys in baseball who can go a year without playing, pick up a bat, and hit the ball hard someplace. But they can’t hit it perfectly 70 straight times. That’s what Tiger would have to do to win.

He’s playing, and as he’s told us so often, he doesn’t enter tournaments just to say he was there. Every time he walks on a course, he expects to win. This week in the Open, he’s the only one thinking that way.

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So think what it would mean if he actually did it. It would be the greatest achievement — ever. It would rip the hearts — and also the livers, spleens, kidneys and guts — out of the rest of the field. It would let Phil and Sergio and Trevor and all the other pretenders know that whatever tiny hopes they held of catching him are dead forever.

It would be beyond a miracle. It would be beyond incredible, unthinkable, impossible, unimaginable. It would be something we’d have to make up a new word just to describe.

It would be Tigeresque.