On Saturday Tiger Woods will head back for more intensive therapy (at a sexual rehabilitation clinic, we’ve been left to presume). He acknowledged he already spent 45 days there, from late December until last week.

“I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it,” he said Friday.

One of the best ways for Tiger to not just verbally express his dedication but show it to his family, friends and the public is simple.
Skip the Masters.

It doesn’t matter to me when he returns, or if he returns at all. It’s just as it didn’t matter which course, if any, to redemption he chose to take. Having decided on this route, he should see it through.

The year’s first major – and its most venerable – begins April 8 at Augusta National. Woods has won it four times and it’s always been considered a favorable course for him. With 14 major championships and a full-on pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18, the concept of a healthy Woods ever skipping the Masters is absurd.

While he’s in his right to return as he wishes, voluntarily missing an event of this magnitude (golf-wise) sends a clear message that there is a tangible consequence to his behavior. It says he’s sacrificing something. It says golf isn’t a priority right now. It says he’s focused on himself, not his legacy.

“I do plan to return to golf one day,” he said. “I just don’t know when that day will be. I don’t rule out that it will be this year.”

Golf has always been most important to him – it’s at least tied with his kids and waitress chasing. The pursuit of Nicklaus’ record is the most important thing in golf. He’s accomplished everything else.

Obviously the man’s self-inflicted wounds are already deep. Giving a 14-minute, international mea culpa is no small step, especially for a man of his ego. Dealing with months of tabloid headlines and cocktail-party jokes is no better. Then there’s the daily realization that he’s crushed his family, ruined his reputation and forever humiliated his wife and children.

He made leaving golf a condition of his attempted redemption when he pulled out of the PGA Tour in December. Few others, faced with crisis, have such a luxury of bailing on work. That’s what a billion dollars in career earnings allow.

He could’ve gone the exact opposite route and given up on his family, offered a half-baked apology and poured himself into work. That’s a route many people – famous or not – take when faced with immense personal turmoil. No one asks Hollywood actors to stop making movies when they wind up on the cover of US Weekly.

Tiger chose the other way, making a dramatic effort to pull his life back together. That was his decision. He ought to maintain the course.

In terms of golf, he hasn’t missed much of anything yet. The season doesn’t begin in earnest until the azaleas bloom in Augusta. Everything else is a warmup. Skipping the Accenture Match Play event is one thing, the Masters is quite another.

Woods announcing Friday he was returning to therapy may have been his most powerful statement. It suggested that he wasn’t trying to simply skate away from his problems, offering an apology and then returning to business as usual.

Neither his words nor his deeds will satisfy everyone. What people want Tiger to say exactly, though, is uncertain. He’s never going to discuss the details of his affairs. He’s never going to expose himself to a pointed one-on one-interview or an uncontrolled room full of reporters.

That’s both the nature of his personality – controlling – and a reasonable effort to save his wife and children from an already horrific situation getting even worse.

“We have a lot to discuss.” he said of wife Elin. “However, what we say to each other will remain between the two of us.”

His atonement, if even possible, begins at home first. To everyone else, though, skipping the Masters – missing something important, showing a tangible “punishment” – is a way of pounding home the idea he understands the gravity of the situation.

Rushing back to the biggest event of the year, the one where most fans first see him, sends a different message. And if he isn’t spending much time sharpening his game – here’s guessing the intensive, in-patient therapy facility doesn’t have a putting green – he isn’t going to win in Augusta anyway.

Woods has done a great deal in the attempt to rectify his self-immolated life. This is the next one. He ought to take the spring off and prove there are things more important than golfing immortality.

Like family and fatherhood.