Flashback: Graham DeLaet Had The Same Surgery As Tiger

Thanks to reader Tim for the reminder of what is both good news and bad news for Tiger.

The good: Graham DeLaet is one of the best golfers on the planet right now after having the same surgery. The bad news? The microdiscectomy took him a long time to recover from.  

Here's a short version filed by Doug Ferguson as a note.

And the long version, the transcript, from the January 2012 Sony Open:

Q. Talk about the back issues and when it first started.

GRAHAM DeLAET: You know, I've always kind of battled a bad back ever since I was a teenager playing hockey growing up when I originally hurt it. There would always be once or twice a year where I would have a flare-up and I would be out of commission for a couple of days, but then it would always get better.

For some reason during 2010 in the Fall Series, I was in a lot of pain but I was playing really real well and then I kept going. Then when the season was over, I just progressively got worse and worse and worse to the point where I couldn't sit down for more than ten seconds and that's kind of when we realized that, you know, surgery was kind of the only option.

I tried a lot of different things, whether it be massage and chiropractor, physical therapy, acupuncturing; tried it all, but nothing was really working. It was the l 5/s 1, lower back.

Q. When did you have surgery??

GRAHAM DeLAET: January 3 of last year.

Q. What kind of surgery??

GRAHAM DeLAET: I had a microdiscectomy, because I had a herniated disk to the right, so they go in to shave off a piece of that to alleviate the pinch on the nerve. I had a terrible pain in my right leg, and you know, yeah, it was not fun. I'm glad it's all over and I'm feeling great now.

Q. Inaudible.

GRAHAM DeLAET: It was actually the next week, I was scheduled to play in the AT&T at Aronimink and I played a practice round early Wednesday morning before the Pro-Am and then I was kind of practicing that afternoon, or that day, and then later that afternoon, it wasn't feeling right.

I think I wanted to be there so bad that I felt that I was better physically than I actually was. And so the next morning, I woke up and I just knew that it's hard enough to compete out here when you're healthy and I just knew that I wasn't in good enough shape to compete.

Q. After the surgery, how long before you were able to pick up a club??

GRAHAM DeLAET: It was at the two-month Mark where I started hitting little chips and putts and half-wedges, kind of thing. By the time -- it wasn't probably until November that I could really like go after a drive as hard as I could, or really lash at one in the deep rough kind of thing.