News that Tiger Woods had knee surgery two days after finishing runner-up to Trevor Immelman at the Masters on Sunday may go some way to explaining the world No1's relatively lacklustre performance at Augusta National.

Woods had arthroscopic surgery on his left knee to repair damaged cartilage and is expected to be out for four to six weeks. He will probably miss The Players Championship, dubbed by some as the fifth major, at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, next month, but he expects to be fit for the US Open, at Torrey Pines, San Diego, in June.

“I made the decision to deal with the pain and schedule the surgery for after the Masters,” Woods said. “The upside is that I have been through this process before and know how to handle it. I look forward to getting back to action as quickly as I can.”

This is the third time that Woods has had surgery on the same knee. In 1994, he had a benign tumour removed and eight years later the knee was drained of fluid and cysts were cut away. After the second operation, he returned to competitive action within eight weeks and won three of his first four tournaments, beginning with the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines in February 2003.

That may be taken as a good omen for the world No1, considering that the US Open will be held there from June 12 to 15 and that, all being well, he will have started playing two weeks earlier, in the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio. But while Torrey Pines is a virtual home from home for Woods - he has won there six times - he will not have had the controlled build-up to a major championship that he prefers.

In 2003, he may have got off to a flyer when he started playing again, but it was a disappointing year as far as the majors were concerned. His best performance was a tie for fourth place at the Open Championship at Royal St George's, but he was not a factor in any of the other three - equal fifteenth at the Masters, equal twentieth at the US Open and equal 39th at the USPGA Championship.

His dominance of the professional game has become such that talk of a grand slam of major championships this year was not regarded as far-fetched. Before finishing fifth at the WGC-CA Championship in Miami, Florida, last month, he had won nine of his previous ten tournaments worldwide and looked almost unbeatable. While his performance at the Masters did not approach the heights people have come to expect, he finished only three strokes behind Immelman, the winner.

Most observers assume that Woods, who has won 13 majors, will go on to pass Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 professional major titles, but this latest setback shows how vulnerable he may be to injury. That it is the same knee that is bothering him will lead to speculation about weakness in the joint. The surgery was performed by Thomas Rosenberg, who treated Woods in 2002, and Hank Haney, his coach, said: “He's been having a lot of trouble, but he doesn't talk about stuff like that. He doesn't want to use excuses. I don't think it affected his play [at Augusta]. It affected his practice a little bit, but he hit 14 greens in regulation on Sunday.”

If there are no complications in his recovery, the enforced layoff will not affect Woods's sharpness on the course. He plays in fewer tournaments than any of his rivals and yet wins far more. In 2007, he played in only 16 events on the PGA Tour in the United States, winning seven times; in the previous year, he won eight out of 15.

The question, however, is: how much more can one knee take? There is an underlying weakness, which may be the undoing of arguably the best player to have graced the sport.