Tiger Woods, 48 and hobbled, can’t win a sixth Masters, but he can make the cut. Should be enough.

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Is winning a record-tying sixth green jacket simply too much to ask of Tiger Woods? Yes, indeed.

But what if all we wished was for Tiger to make a record 24th consecutive cut, with Tiger roars echoing through the towering pines at Augusta National on Saturday and Sunday? Yes, please.

Fred Couples, who plays a practice round with Woods most years, was one of his practice partners for Tuesday’s front-nine session. Boom Boom said his pal looks primed.

“Tiger is hitting it pure,” Couples said. “I think last year it was so bad that a lot of things just wore him down — playing in that rain, moving around slowly, sluggish. But this year he looks strong. I think he looks really, really good.”

Looking good and playing well are two very different things, especially when it takes so much effort to just look good. Tiger remains ...

Hopeful? Optimistic? Delusional?

“If everything comes together, I think I can get one more,” he said Tuesday, baring his teeth. “Do I need to describe that any more than that, or are we good?”

Delusional it is.

For a 48-year-old, 28-year professional athlete who has undergone 13 surgeries since 1994, it foolish to think Woods can become the oldest player to win the Masters. Jack Nicklaus was 46 when he won his sixth in 1986, at the end of the pre-Tiger era when the game’s elitist bubble still existed and fitness training was something Richard Simmons did, not golfers.

Between illness and injury, Tiger hasn’t finished a full-field tournament in 14 months. In December he finished 18th at his 20-man Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, and Will Zalatoris withdrew.

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It will be a cold and rainy Thursday on Augusta’s 6½ miles of hills. Last year, he withdrew on Sunday morning after the conditions and the terrain wore him down.

“We’re playing on a hillside, and we’re just meandering back and forth across that hillside,” Woods said.

Conditions won’t be great again this year, but he isn’t staggering around the grounds like he was last year. He made the cut on the number in 2023 before, to no one’s surprise, plantar fasciitis took him down.

He wasn’t exactly spry when he played the back nine Monday and the front nine Tuesday, but ankle fusion surgery and weeks of therapy have him looking his best since the 2021 accident that mangled his right leg and foot. He isn’t limping, for a change. Not yet, anyway.

It is a marked change.

Woods withdrew from the Genesis Invitational in February, citing a case of the flu, but he was walking and playing badly, too. He planned to play the Players Championship last month, but complications from his lingering maladies kept him away.

“My body wasn’t ready,” he said. “My game wasn’t ready.”

Maybe everything is ready now. Maybe he can rev it up in time for the PGA Championship in May at Valhalla, for the U.S. Open in June at Pinehurst, then for the British in July at Scotland’s Royal Troon. Maybe everything will keep coming together.

So much has to come together for him to make it through this weekend. So much has to come together all the time. For years, he has needed hours of pre-golf warmup and post-golf cooldown. The pain remains.

“I hurt every day,” he said.

He was asked, indelicately, if he was on painkillers. Woods would not say. Woods entered a rehab clinic in 2020 after being charged with DUI during a traffic stop.

Wood has rehabilitated his image as much as his body. A car accident uncovered rampant, sordid infidelities that ended his marriage 14 years ago, and the DUI brought further dishonor to his brand. But now, after serving as a captain’s assistant, he’s being courted as America’s next Ryder Cup captain. He said he will meet with PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh after the Masters concludes.

Maybe that’s where Tiger belongs: in a golf cart, wearing a team jacket, with a walkie-talkie and an earpiece.

He’s ranked 959th in the world. He will face the best field of players golf has seen this season, since LIV Golf players are banned from PGA Tour non-majors and the Masters is the first major. Can he win?

No.

That should not be the focus. That should not be the question.

The Masters cut is top-50 and ties. Can Tiger beat 39 players over the next two days? Can he do it on a course that will be drenched, treacherous, and long, after an inch-and-a-half of rain falls in 16 hours during the first round Thursday?

Absolutely.

There are four players from the Champions Tour. There are five amateurs. Four of the 13 LIV players aren’t real threats. There are several players trending downward, like Justin Rose, Ryan Fox, and 2023 sensation Lucas Glover, who vaulted from 166th to 30th between June and August but hasn’t had a top-10 finish since. That leaves about 20 players against whom Woods likely would be competing for an early Saturday tee time.

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His best hope: experience. Woods said he and old heads like him know the safest places to miss shots to still have a chance to save par. That’s how he made the cut last year, despite essentially playing on one leg.

Watching him stagger down the steep, slippery hills at Augusta National last year evoked both pity and awe. It is the stuff of all champions: a will to compete until the end, no matter how bitter.

How close is Woods’ end? When will he join the ranks of Nicklaus, Gary Player, and Tom Watson, the honorary starters who will hit the first tee shots Thursday?

Woods bristled at the notion: “I have not thought about being a starter here, no.”

The truth is, he’s much closer to being a honorary starter than the honored finisher. His realistic goal should be finishing, period.

“I think the last thing he’s thinking about is [just] making the cut,” Couples said. “Can he win here? You know what? Yeah.”

Apparently, Tiger’s not the only one who’s delusional.