Just another knock on Woods
He went from world No. 1 to rock bottom and back; now he’s discovered a new nadir
Some years ago, a guest at a cottage, I came across a stack of magazines that were quite old, in that frozen-in-time cottage way. A Sports Illustrated from 1980 had a cover story on Jack Nicklaus’ victory at the PGA Championship.
The start of that piece: “Jack Nicklaus, comma.”
The point was that there was nothing to say about Nicklaus that hadn’t already been said.
And so, here we are: Tiger Woods, comma.
Woods, now, has the unusual distinction of exhausting things to say about him twice in his career. There was the decadelong run beginning in the late 1990s in which he owned the sport of golf and was quite obviously destined to eventually own all of its records. There weren’t enough superlatives to describe him at that point.
Now, we are pretty much out of ways to assess his downfall. His career has been eulogized so many times already that questions about the impact of his latest scandal on his professional life miss that point entirely: How can you hurt something that is already dead? Might as well give it a few more shots with the defibrillator.
But since news broke of Woods’ DUI arrest in Florida on Monday and his subsequent apology — the one where he wasn’t making any excuses and then proceeded to provide an excuse — there’s been a characterization that this is of a piece with Tiger’s fall from grace in 2009. The bleary-eyed mug shot and the “DUI of the Tiger” headlines were just the post-credits end scene to the story of someone who has been on a straight downfall since his wife discovered strange text messages on his cellphone that November eight years ago.
But that’s not quite true, and it makes the Woods story even stranger. He did have a shockingly fast fall from his position as one of the world’s most successful athletes ever. But then he climbed most of the way back, and now he’s returned to the bottom again, having found a new nadir. It’s starting to feel like the most remarkable thing about Woods was not the rapidity of his descent, but how such a troubled guy managed to avoid the fall as long as he did.
For a man who was at once world-famous and yet intensely publicity shy — he named his two yachts Privacy and Solitude — some common themes have emerged about Woods over the years. He had an unusually close relationship with his father Earl, and spent much of his childhood golfing and otherwise hanging around with his dad and his navy buddies in California. He was distraught by his father’s infidelity, but the two remained close and he was shaken by Earl’s death in 2006.
An ESPN magazine story last May by the author Wright Thompson posited that it was this event, not the discovery of Tiger’s own prodigious infidelity three years later, that set off the great unmooring of Woods’ career from its previously steady course. Thompson described a Woods who was strangely unfulfilled, given all his accomplishments, and who became bizarrely obsessed with U.S. navy SEAL training, flying off after tournaments to shoot guns and jump out of airplanes and get beaten up. It was a way to feel some kind of bond with his father, and if nothing else it helps explain how Woods changed from the lithe kid with the whiplash swing to a golfer who looked like a middle linebacker. Former members of Woods’ inner circle — there are a lot of those — have suggested Tiger’s history of back and knee injuries, and his intense militarystyle training, are probably not mutually exclusive things.
And, yet: Earl passed away more than a decade ago and Tiger’s mortifyingly awkward confessions — his mother sat in the front row at his news conference — came almost eight years ago. But just three years ago this spring, Woods was the No. 1 ranked golfer in the world. He had won three times in 2012 and another five times in 2013 and was the leading money-winner on the PGA Tour. He had not yet won a major championship since his one-legged victory at the U.S. Open in 2008, but such a possibility did not seem out of the question.
At the 2013 Masters, he was closing hard on the lead in his Friday round when he hit the flagstick on the 15th hole and bounced into the water, which eventually turned into a triple bogey after an improper drop. If that goes differently — Woods finished four shots out of a playoff on that Sunday — we aren’t talking about him today as someone who lost his way 10 years ago.
Tiger’s second act was comprehensively derailed with the back injury and surgery the following spring, and he’s only ever managed aborted returns since. He has career winnings of more than US$110 million — about US$550,000 of that since the start of the 2014 season.
Even without Monday’s arrest and the fallout that could yet come, Woods was already coming off a fourth back surgery and eyeing a return to competitive golf in 2018 — a full four seasons since he was healthy. Talk of a comeback seems fanciful.
Woods already came back once. It just didn’t take.