BIG PICTURE: It’s easy to get carried away by the fact Tiger Woods ended his two year winless drought over the weekend. Yes, the former world number one has been playing more consistent golf of late, going back to just before the Presidents Cup. Yes, the victory is a vindication of sorts for the “process” he has undertaken with Canadian coach Sean Foley, who has come under some intense criticism since taking up with Woods. And yes, a win is a win is a win but let’s look at the big picture here.

The event - the Chevron World Challenge - is not an official PGA Tour event and it is a limited field event (only 18 of Tiger’s closest friends are invited). Of all the players in the field, Tiger is most familiar with the course, having won four times previous to Sunday. It does provide for world ranking points (which is another matter altogether) and while the field did sport 11 of the top 25 ranked players in the world, it was missing players ranked 1 through 5 while Dustin Johnson was busy keeping his leg elevated at home after undergoing knee surgery.

Let’s face it, after the FedEx Cup championship, most players have mentally put away the clubs and use the latter part of the year to pick up some extra Christmas money. If they happen to pick up a win, that’s just gravy. That’s not to say that the players who were invited to compete at the Chevron event were just going through the motions - Zach Johnson would have surely taken the win to get off his own personal year-plus schnide - but when you’re picking up $140,000 for finishing in last place the term “pressure” doesn’t exactly come to mind.

The significance of Sunday’s win is that Woods finally got the gorilla off his back. Anyone who had watched him prior to the Presidents Cup knew that a win was only a matter of time - just a question of how much time. Better to have won now, when the pressure was essentially off, than to show up at Augusta that first week of April having to answer all those questions again after another winter of discontent.

Perhaps the sad part of Tiger’s win on Sunday is that he - and the rest of us - will have to wait almost two months before he tees it up again in Abu Dhabi. And you can be sure that field will not be hand picked and will feature a stiffer test against the players atop the world rankings which he will have to beat on a consistent basis if he is to continue his quest of chasing down Jack Nicklaus’ career record for major victories.

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BEFORE AND AFTER: Here is Tiger Woods' record in the two years before and after that Thanksgiving Day crash which changed the golfers life:

Prior - 10 tournament wins and 1 major (U.S. Open)

After - 1 win and zero major victories

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THE OMEN: If Tiger’s win on Sunday is a sign of things to come then Woods need only look at former participants of the event over the last couple of years. Jim Furyk won in 2009 and then had his first three-win season the next year, culminating with the $10-million FedEx Cup. Also in 2009, Graeme McDowell was a last minute invite to the event and went on to finish second. The following year, he won his first U.S. Open championship.

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TATTOO YOU: Bubba Watson retweeted this tweet from an admirer, who decided to get a tattoo of the PGA golfer.

Keen observers quickly noted that Watson is a lefty and the tattoo shows him holding a right handed driver! (At least they got the rigth shade of pink in the shaft!)

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FINAL WORD

"Golf is a fickle game. There is a fine line between greatness and not.” - Australian golfer Robert Allenby