WOODS ENDURES QUITE THE SWING IN PUBLIC PERSONA
‘More human’ Tiger suddenly the people’s underdog after years of career setbacks
After a tournament in which Tiger Woods finished well back of the lead, Lee Westwood was asked about him. “I don’t want to say he’s not the golfer he was, but at the same time golf gives you one and takes away another.”
The Englishman noted that Woods’ various ordeals had taken a toll: “To all the players, it made him look a little more human,” Westwood said. “A bit more like us.”
These comments were made more than eight years ago.
It’s a funny thing to look back at the state of Woods from that time, when it seemed like he had hit absolute rock bottom. At the end of 2010, I was writing a piece on the year in golf and my editor argued that the story wasn’t who won any of the big tournaments, but the struggles of Woods, which included a career-worst finish at the Bridgestone Invitational, a tournament he had won seven times. My editor was right and was in fact quite prescient.
The Woods of eight years ago was returning from knee surgery and his impossibly embarrassing fidelity scandal. He was a punchline on all the late-night shows, his previously private life had been revealed in great detail in his mortifying public confessions, and he had plainly lost his competitive edge on the golf course.
The other striking thing about the coverage from that time is that no one felt the least bit sorry for Woods. He had been intense to the point of surliness on the course, prone to fits of anger that caused golf purists to fan themselves anxiously at the break from decorum and kept a tight circle of friends who would find themselves out of the circle if they said boo about him to anyone else.
If a guy who had everything — and he did — wanted to throw it away with a prolific series of affairs, that was his own damn fault.
I was thinking about this era of Woods after Sunday’s events at the Tour Championship, where he not only won for the first time in five years, but did so as some sort of conquering hero with the galleries at East Lake near Atlanta rapt in their devotion to him. Normally, a back-nine stroll to an easy win is kind of boring, but that one turned into a long, triumphant march, a throwback to Woods’ glory years.
What I was thinking was what happened? When Woods crashed his Buick on that U.S. Thanksgiving 10 years ago, whole cities could have been powered by the schadenfreude if such technology was available. Over the years since, his story has largely been one of humiliation piled on top of disappointment. There was a return to form on the course in the early part of this decade, although Tiger still couldn’t get it done on the weekend at a major championship, quite possibly because his rivals were well aware that he was, in fact, human; and then that all fell apart when his health problems moved from his knee to his neck and back.
There were failed comebacks and seasons cut short abruptly and so many missed cuts and even a case of the dreaded yips. The background to all of the on-course problems was a steady reveal about the life of Woods, which turned out to be surprisingly grim and depressing. Books and magazine articles painted the picture of a guy who grew up without social skills, raised by a domineering father to be a golfing machine. When Earl Woods died in 2006, his son was adrift, pouring himself into military training to fill the void. Before the injuries caught up to him, Tiger Woods was already a perplexing character, embarking on wholesale swing changes under new coaches multiple times even though he had never had a serious challenger among PGA Tour rivals. To read these accounts is to find Woods a sad and lonely figure. Even when he participated in the process, such as the interview published by Time magazine in 2015, he did not sound like a cheery bloke.
“I walk 10 minutes on the beach. That’s it,” he said. “Then I come back home and lie back down on the couch or a bed.”
Is that the kind of stuff that has turned around the perception of Woods? The years of very public failure on the golf course coupled with the details of a broken, withdrawn man?
When (Tiger) Woods crashed his Buick ... 10 years ago, whole cities could have been powered by the schadenfreude if such technology was available.
I suspect that more golf fans are familiar with the guy who at his peak built mansions and bought yachts and palled around with sheiks than the guy who once found himself prone on the grass in his backyard, unable to move and only rescued when his daughter happened along, but it seems many fans have become sympathetic to him anyway.
It was just last year that Woods was charged with driving under the influence and confessed to struggles with painkillers, but this has apparently just made him more relatable.
All of which is fine. I’m not one to hope that he suffers eternal shame for his misdeeds; I’m just surprised that so much of the public, which was divided on him even when he was dominant, agrees. Are we really just suckers for a comeback story?
For all the things that are remarkable about the career arc of Woods, the fact that he would end up recast as a plucky — even lovable? — underdog might be the most surprising.