Revisiting Tiger & The 49ers: No. 4, Vijay Singh

All week, we're running down the best golfers in our massive Tiger & The 49ers feature from before the 2009 season, surveying who's up and who's down midway through the year. Next up: The Big Fijian.

No. 4: Vijay Singh

His 2009: Three top 10s; best finish: T6 at the Crowne Plaza Invitational; FedEx Cup rank: 59

The story: Vijay has always been a feast-or-famine kind of golfer, and if last fall and his FedEx Cup victory was the feast, we hit the famine earlier this year. True, surgery kept him off the course for several weeks. Afterward, he cracked the top 30 of both the Masters and the U.S. Open. But it's only recently that he's looked like the Vijay of old; we picked him as a dark horse for the British Open, and while that didn't pan out, I don't expect him to continue to remain on the margins much longer.

Up or down? Eh, maybe down, but really, who could compete with how he finished out 2008? A $10 million check buys a lot of mulligans, metaphorically if not literally. As the injury recedes farther in the distance, expect The Big Fijian to continue his assault on golf courses around America.