LIFER MARCH 21, 2013
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Tiger Woods is back, sort of. A couple of weeks ago, he was invited to play golf with Barack Obama, and the occasion had the feel of an official pardon, a suggestion that Tiger had sufficiently rehabbed himself, on and off the course, that he could again be welcome in presidential company. Lately, his game has also shown signs of twitching to life. Woods won the first PGA tournament he entered this year, the Farmers Insurance Open, by four strokes, and is now number two in the world, up from fifty-eighth in 2011. His next big test will come at Augusta next month, and what I haven’t been able to decide is whether to root for him or not.
That would have been a pointless question back in his prime, when Woods played with such ferocity and concentration that he didn’t seem to notice or care if we were watching, unless it was to shoot a death glance at some idiot snapping a picture during his backswing. He didn’t need rooters, nor did he feed off the gallery the way that, say, the goofy-grinning Phil Mickelson did, and he never warmed to the media. Gods don’t care what mortals think of them.What most of us felt for Woods back then was not love but awe. He wasn’t just the best golfer in the world, but as close to athletic perfection as I have ever seen in my lifetime. His swing was a marvel of grace and efficiency, and if you were like me, you couldn’t watch enough of it even as it made you feel in equal measure both astonished and a little resentful. He made golf look too easy.
And then overnight—the night of Thanksgiving 2009, to be precise—everything changed, or seemed to. There was the riveting spectacle of Tiger Woods, the most private and inaccessible of athletes, surrounded by handlers (including Ari Fleischer at one point) and wrapped in layers of public relations batting, caught on the front page of the tabloids looking dazed and glassy-eyed after his wife attacked his Cadillac with a golf club. After the drip, drip of embarrassing revelations—so lurid that we savored every one—Woods took some time off and checked himself into a clinic for sex addicts. When he came back, he was different. The shine had gone off him.
You never know who’s going to show up anymore: the Woods who shoots in the sixties or the one who can’t sink a putt and cards a 77. In the final round of the Honda Classic, his fourth outing this year, he lost two balls and plopped two others into the drink, and this, we’ve come to recognize, is the new Tiger. He used to be invincible on the weekends, Sundays especially, causing opponents to defeat themselves even before stepping up to the first tee, and now no one is afraid of him. All golfers have slumps, even Jack Nicklaus, whose record of 18 majors Woods covets more than anything. What’s remarkable about Woods is not that he tumbled, but that he tumbled so far. How did this happen? Watching Woods on the course, muttering to himself, flinging clubs, you get the feeling that he’s still trying to figure it out.
Illustration by Tang Yau Hoong
Of course the moralists among us think they know exactly what happened: Tiger made a mess of his personal life, became ensnared in a scandal of his own making, and now he’s being punished on the golf course. Here, too, there was an epic dimension. Woods is hardly the first golfer to cheat on his wife. Arnold Palmer, if you trust the rumors, is called “the King” not just for his accomplishments on the course. Walter Hagen, the first great American pro, was a famous womanizer who, when his wife caught him sneaking in one morning without any underwear, looked down at himself in pretend surprise and claimed that he had been robbed. But in the case of Woods, it wasn’t just one girlfriend, or two, or three; there were so many, we lost count. Woods’s downfall was poetic justice, we liked to think, and even made up in a small way for all those athletes who get away with everything.
But in fact Woods’s game had already started to falter before that fateful Thanksgiving evening. He failed to win a major that year for the first time since 2004. Frustrated, he parted ways with his swing coach, Hank Haney, and after a period of trying to coach himself, in August 2010, he hired a new one, Sean Foley, who took Tiger’s swing into the lab and began to rebuild it, practically from the ground up. They’re still working on it, and to me, this is by far the most depressing part of the story. If Tiger Woods, a superb athlete with state-of-the-art coaching and the leisure to bang hundreds of balls a day, still hasn’t fixed himself after three years, what hope is there for the rest of us?
A year ago, Foley said he thought the reason Woods wasn’t winning had more to do with his personal ordeal than with his mechanics. That seems reasonable, but it’s possible that his head was messed up in a different way from the one we imagine and that what really undid Woods was not humiliation so much as that, with no wife and children around, without a secret social schedule to juggle, not to mention all those Las Vegas logistics to oversee, he had too much time to think about his golf swing. The really amazing thing about Tiger Woods, it turns out, is that he won all those tournaments while leading a double, even a triple life, while most of us have trouble managing just one.
The other thing that happened to Woods is that he started to wear out, his knees especially. He will turn 38 at the end of December, which is not old for a golfer, exactly, but old to win majors. Nicklaus won only three of them after turning 38, including an improbable victory at the Masters when he was 46. Even since his tentative comeback, Woods’s performance in the majors has been horrific, and skeptics are convinced that part of his career is done. “I think he knows his time’s up,” Greg Norman has said.
Already there is a new Tiger: the Irishman Rory McIlroy, who, at 23, has won two majors and is sitting on top of Woods in the world rankings. He’s freckled, curly-haired, and endearing, lovable in a way Woods never was. Meanwhile, Woods still doesn’t need or even tolerate us fans very happily. He remains set on his solitary quest to become the greatest ever. But his tragedy, if you can call it that, is the tragedy of the ordinary. He’s become just like the rest of us, or almost like the rest of us, suffering from hair loss and aching joints and the occasional yips. Neither in victory nor in disgrace will he ever be as spellbinding to watch.
9 comments
who ever the "artist" used to create the image purportedly of Tiger on the magazine's index page was—hopefully they won't be used again
- teoc
March 21, 2013 at 1:30am
Meh, golf is a bore any way you slice it. (Pun intended!) If you're in need of an ageing sports archangel, one who never fell from grace, forget Tiger and look to surfing's Kelly Slater. The man is arguably one of the greatest sportsmen of all time. He was the youngest (at 20) ever to win a world title and the oldest (at 39). He has won 11 titles all up and last year, at age 40, came a close second for a 12th, falling short only because he was--quite arguably--robbed of a tournament victory early in the year by questionable judging. And still he doesn't quit, having taken out the trophy at 2013's first tour event at Snapper Rocks earlier this month. And lest anyone question it, surfing is athletic as hell, way more so than golf. As in golf, a surfer needs to be able to read the conditions and adjust to his environment, but he also needs to be able to paddle like Michael Phelps and twist in the air like a circus acrobat. The fact that at 41 years of age Slater is still the man to beat is absurd beyond belief.
- AaronW
March 21, 2013 at 7:02am
An irony: I'd venture to guess that except perhaps in Hawaii and Southern California, Kelly S has no trouble walking down a street in his native USA and going completely unrecognised, whereas here in Australia he'd be mobbed by autograph-seekers everywhere he goes.
- AaronW
March 21, 2013 at 7:10am
We despise the Yankees because they win every year and despise the Yankees because they don't. Americans are hard to please, because it's impossible to be both perfect and fallible at the same time. So much for my own game, how about Tiger's? Golf is not tennis, which can be dominated by one or two players, not now, not ever, but especially not now. The quality of play today isn't comparable to that 40 years ago, or even 10 or 15 years ago. Many young golfers today are superb athletes, athletes who could excel in most any sport but have chosen golf because the game has become so much more popular and so much more profitable. As Tiger has pointed out, the competition in his early days on tour was not the competition today, the statistic he uses to confirm the point the number of players who make the cut on Friday who are within striking distance of the leader. In years past, it was maybe 10. Today it's 30, 40, or more. The spread between the leader and the last to make the cut has been compressed by at least 10 strokes. Lindsey Vonn, Tiger's new girlfriend, is the mirror image of Tiger. If it takes courage to putt those table top greens at Augusta on Sunday, it takes far more to ski straight down hall at over 80 miles per hour. Tiger has a lot to learn from Ms. Vonn.
- rayward
March 21, 2013 at 7:48am
AaronW, your Australian habitat is showing. I follow most sports somewhat, but I never heard of Kelly Slater, mostly because surfing is not a top fan sport in America--the interest for it is largely among those who participate in it. I admit that surfers are great athletes. But so are good golfers, because anything that requires hand-eye coordination is athletic. Even bowlers can be great athletes, and, yes, even curlers. rayward, you're right about the courage it takes to putt on the 18th at Augusta on Sunday and the courage it takes to tear down a ski slope at 80 MPH. I don't watch skiing, because I don't want to see somebody mangled or killed, but I do watch golfing occasionally simply to watch Tiger. I care about no other golfer. If he wins this weekend, he'll be back to No. 1 in the world again. I'll check him out Sunday afternoon, if he's still in the running. As for Lindsey Vonn's courage, I think she'll need more of it to remain Tiger's official girlfriend than she will to hit the slopes again. Skiing is in her blood. I doubt that Tiger is, probably because she knows that Tigers don't change their stripes.
- magboy47.
March 21, 2013 at 10:36am
I simply do not agree that golfing is in any way comparable to the athleticism of surfing. Hand-eye? Yes. What else, beyond a good walk spoiled? Surfing (and many other sports) demand huge, sustained bursts of energy combined with the the interaction of dozens of highly-trained muscle-groups and nerve-centers. No comparison, excepting, of course, golf's unequaled upwardly-mobile, white-shoe bourgeois appeal and slow as hell pacing.
- Curran1
March 22, 2013 at 12:13am
SHOW 1 RESPONSE
Magboy, I agree that within certain bounds--I would exclude musical performance, for instance--any form of primarily physical activity whose participants endeavor to surpass each other and themselves by mustering their reserves of talent and honing them through training and practice qualifies as "athletic." Golf certainly counts, as do skiing and surfing. ............................................................................................. It's interesting to note that the most popular individual spectator sports--golf, tennis and, here in Australia, surfing--are all popular participant sports. Anyone who has taken up a 9-iron knows how difficult it is to birdie even a stupid little par three hole on his local public course, much less do it hole after hole at Augusta National, and there is pleasure in watching the gods do things on the turf you know you'll never touch. Surfing is exactly the same, and I suppose that this dynamic places a limit on surfing's wider appeal as a spectator sport; you don't watch it unless you do it yourself, and unless you live in Oz, Hawaii or the California coast, you're not likely to be able to do it even if you're so inclined. ...................................................................................... I mentioned Slater mainly because I don't know of another case where a single person in a legitimate, full-on professional sport--top prize at the Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro which starts next week will be north of $425K, nearly a third of the Masters purse--has been as dominant for as long. Surfing suffers a little for being a judged sport, so there's room for people to argue that one competitor has been unjustly favored, but as in figure skating, it really isn't all that hard to learn what's expected of the athletes and to know which surfer in a heat has come up best even before the scores come out.
- AaronW
March 21, 2013 at 7:48pm
Also, fuck golf. Goddamn boring-ass, elitist sport wasting all the water in our precious aquifers. I will say that driving ranges are cool, though: five bucks, and you just go out and slam balls two or three-hundred yards till you strain something or get attacked by bears. Good times.
- Curran1
March 22, 2013 at 12:18am
Tiger just moved back up to being the #1 golfer in the world. So much for Greg Norman's "I think [Tiger] knows his time's up" crap. From the day Tiger blew onto the golf scene, Greg Norman has been knocking him ceaselessly. He's not exactly an unbiased observer of Tiger. More like wishful thinking, I think. You go, Tiger.
- scrubby
March 25, 2013 at 9:04pm