Tiger Woods waves to the gallery after finishing his final round at the Masters on Sunday in Augusta, Ga.

Augusta, Ga. ? Tiger Woods’ swing was a mess.

He started the final round of the 74th Masters with a duck hook straight from the Wednesday evening beer league at your local muni. He hit shots so crooked they would have made a 25-handicapper blush. He left a sand shot in a bunker, which he probably hasn’t done since he was 6 years old. He played pinball in the pines and hockey on the greens.

And somehow, some way, after a five-month break from the game, he finished in a tie for fourth place Sunday.

Glass half full?

Not if you’re Woods, stuck on 14 major championship titles since the 2008 U.S. Open, stuck on four Masters titles since 2005.

For Woods, there are no moral victories and there is no satisfaction in close calls, so he left the Augusta National Golf Club bitterly disappointed.

“Well, I entered this event and I only enter events to win,” he said. “I didn’t get it done. I didn’t hit the ball good enough, and I made too many mistakes around the greens. Consequently, I’m not there.”

He shot a 3-under-par 69, finished at 11-under 277 and tied for fourth place with K.J. Choi, his playing partner all four rounds.

Asked if he was relieved the week was over, Woods joked, “Yeah, I don’t have to play with K.J. anymore.”

Woods never offered up as an excuse the extraordinary circumstances surrounding his hiatus from the game, which started with an early morning SUV crash in late November and snowballed into salacious revelations of extramarital affairs and therapy for an undisclosed condition.

He went into the Masters with no tournament rounds under his belt this year but had practiced for weeks at Isleworth, his home course in Windermere, Fla. This was not a test run. He wasn’t dipping his toe back into competitive golf.

“I finished fourth, not what I wanted,” he said. “I wanted to win this tournament.”

Woods said he knew even before going to the first tee Sunday that his game wasn’t where he needed it to be.

“I had another terrible warm-up,” he said. “I didn’t have it, and it was pretty evident. I had a two-way miss going today so it was a really tough day. I felt very uneasy on every shot I hit out there.”

No matter how you feel about Woods, you’ve got to give him this: Even when he is playing army golf — left, right, left, right — he never gives up.