“I’m not part of the team, unfortunately,” he said. “It’s about those 12 guys. It’s not about me. I’m not part of that crew.”

Woods first had surgery on his left knee while at Stanford in 1994 to remove a benign tumor. He had surgery after the 2002 season to drain fluid and remove cysts around his ACL.

“When I had my cyst removed from my ACL, there wasn’t a whole lot left,” he said. “So they said, ’Basically, you need to train and develop your hamstring and glute and calf as much as you possibly can to hold it. Everyone was surprised it lasted as long as it did before I ruptured it. It was just running on the golf course. Just happened to take one little step — it didn’t really take much — and it just popped.”

That was after the British Open last year, and Woods still won four of his final five tournaments, tying for second in the other.

He never considered ACL surgery last fall, when he played only one time in a four-month period. Instead, he tried to build up strength during his layoff to give his leg more stability. And it held up fine — just not long enough.

“The natural rotation of the golf swing without the ACL made it a little bit unstable, and it caused some cartilage damage because of that,” he said. “I had that rectified after the Masters. When they went in there, they discovered some more cartilage damage that they’d have to fix in conjunction with the ACL reconstruction, and it was going to be kind of a double dip there.

“That surgery I had after the Masters was to get me through the rest of the ’08 season,” he said. “But, as you know, I developed stress fractures and decided it to bag it for the year.”

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