Injured Tiger has to pull out but hopes for a speedy return
TWO days after playing down concerns over his fitness, Tiger Woods was forced to withdraw from The Northern Trust ahead of his second round at Liberty National.
Woods struggled to an opening four-over-par 75 on Thursday after restricting himself to chipping and putting on the back nine of Wednesday’s pro-am due to stiffness in his back.
In a statement released yesterday, the Masters champion wrote: “Due to a mild oblique strain that led to pain and stiffness, I have to withdraw from The Northern Trust.
“I went for treatment early Friday morning but unfortunately I’m still unable to compete. I’d like to thank the New Jersey and New York fans for their support and remain hopeful I can compete next week at the BMW Championship.”
Speaking on Wednesday, Woods said he felt it was the “smart” approach not to hit full shots during the second half of the 18hole pro-am, adding: “This is kind of how it is. Some days I’m stiffer than others.”
The 43-year-old has played just 13 tournament rounds since winning his 15 th major title at Augusta National in April, two years after he underwent career-saving spinal fusion surgery.
Woods followed a missed cut in the US PGA Championship with a top-10 finish in the Memorial Tournament and a tie for 21st in the US Open, but then took a month off before missing the cut in the Open Championship.
Speaking at the Open at Royal Portrush last month, Woods admitted he had little choice but to play a limited schedule.
“Getting myself into position to win the Masters, it took a lot out of me,” said Woods, who has had four knee operations and four back surgeries during his illustrious career.
“I want to play here as long as I possibly can and you have to understand if I play a lot, I won’t be out here that long.” A COUPLE of days after Trevor Ringland had made his Ireland debut, his mother Rhoda was walking through Larne, going about her start-of-the-week routine.
Stopped by a local there, he told that she must be proud of her son and that he “didn’t stand too straight for that song of theirs”.
On she went a few hundred yards and was again called over by a well-wisher. But this one had a complicated addendum to his compliment.
“You must be very proud after Saturday, but tell him from me that he stood far too straight for that song of theirs.” Belfast, 1981.
Tread softly for you tread on someone’s dreams.
“You quickly learned that you couldn’t win,” laughs Ringland. “But doing and showing what can be done on this island is the best way to answer those who carry any sort of prejudice.”
The game had been a four-point defeat to Australia down in Dublin and, with it being late November, the valley was hushed and white with snow. But that whole year had been all about shadow rather than sunshine.
In the months leading up to it, from Sands to Doherty and McDonnell to Divine, the hunger strikers had wasted away to the grave and on into martyrdom. All-out war loomed over those left behind.
Yet here was Ringland (below) in Lansdowne at a time when symbols meant so much. From a unionist background standing for their anthem and their flag. Standing for Ireland.
“But for me, it was an environment where you wanted to be there representing everyone on the island and rugby allowed that.
And there and then it was a different way to use those symbols. It wasn’t the same Soldier’s Song and tricolour as the one wrapped around the IRA which was trying to kill people like my father every day.
“I always maintain too the Union Flag for me is also very different to the one wrapped around Ian Paisley or Loyalist paramilitaries. Difficult times, sure.
“I was at Queen’s at that stage and there was so much going on that was divisive, but things like sport - and you’d the Northern Ireland football team too - all of those were acting as a counter-dynamic to the sense of despair coming out of the conflict that was growing so fast.”
In such circumstances hate is easier than compassion; wrong comes more naturally than right; violence is the reflex as opposed to tolerance; loathing creates fear rather than shards of hope.
Yet simply listen to his words and consider his reaction for it’s what makes Ringland so special.
Sure, we could talk about the 1982 and 1985 Triple Crowns, the latter where he finished off one of the greatest Irish tries of any era in Murrayfield. That would be a waste though.
After all, the guy talking about so such unity and friendship was once the kid who’d watch his father each morning check under the car for bombs, as Dad was a policeman and this was part of existing.
Adrian Ringland was a rock in a hard place.
Years later, Trevor worked out that he’d had at least five direct attempts on his life, never mind all the indirect efforts to turn his son into a resentful bastard. In his house there’d be none of that.
“But he was not the exception, he was the rule,” recalls Trevor. “People today say that must be terrible but it had no impact on me as such. The real answer as to why it did keep us neutral in our home and the thing that did impact was my father’s experiences of scenes he had to visit.”
From there he goes on to talk about specific instances like how Adrian had to try work out which family member might be strong enough to identify a victim, seeing a severed head via the IRA, combing through evidence around a body that had had a full Kalashnikov magazine emptied into the flesh, and working on Bloody Friday as Belfast exploded and people came running for help.
“I think what shaped us was that his stories weren’t of one side doing things, it was all sides doing things to the people in our society,” Ringland continues.
“In a strange way it kept a sense of balance. There was one night where my father was leaving the police station in north Belfast when it was attacked by the IRA and he spent two hours in a gun battle. That same night my mother got a call from the local police station where we lived to say that Loyalists were burning policemen out of their houses. You occupied a position as if a third section of our society.
“It’s one of the major problems I had with the likes of Ian Paisley, he put my father in a position where his life was in danger, never mind him using the futility of violence to try to unite the people of Ireland. It was never going to work.
“There were examples of using relationships to grow and you wonder why people don’t follow those. Even to this day you listen to some of the language and think to yourself, ‘Have you guys really not learned your lessons over the years?’”
It may seem trite and forced, but for Ringland he maintains sport was a sanctuary for himself and a salvation for the place he holds dear.
He clings to the little moments of caring it provided. In Queen’s once, a young player on the rugby team got badly injured and next thing a call came from the most unlikely of phones.
Ballygalget GAA club had heard about the poor guy and wanted to help raise some money so they went to the Ards Peninsula and played a half of rugby and a half of GAA and spent the night in each other’s company learning they’d more in common than extremists ever wanted them to realise.
“The fact we don’t know each other is a failure of history and of how we’ve done relationships on this island. We showed we can do it differently.”
Even in the darkest hours he found light through sport. Take 1987 and the very first World Cup and compare and contrast with the trivial complexity and complications around the build up to this edition
Less than a month before the opener against Wales in Wellington, two cars made their way to the Republic for training.
He was in one with Syd Miller, Keith Crossan and Hugo MacNeill who’d been speaking at a dinner in Larne Rugby Club the night before.
They got near the border and were diverted but how little they knew. Ahead in the other vehicle were Nigel Carr, Philip Rainey and Davey Irwin who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The IRA had decided to blow up Lord Chief Justice Maurice Gibson and his wife with the blast catching the Irish internationals too.
The damage to Carr’s body meant he’d never play again.
“It comes back to how can you go on to play for Ireland in those circumstances,” says Ringland.
“These people who claim they were promoting a united view of Ireland said that’s why they did what they did. But we were about really uniting, of wanting to be together and doing us all proud.
“That acts as a counter to the hatred. That counter doesn’t get the profile it should but it’s one of the reasons we didn’t descend into civil war. We teetered on the edge of that on occasion but we never stepped over that edge into an absolute disaster because of people like Gordon Wilson, Mairead Corrigan and so on.
“For me rugby and sport also helped avert that catastrophe.
“In rugby, the key thing was an Irishness that could be inclusive of the British dimension on the island and a Britishness that could be respectful of the Irishness. We represented inclusion.”
When Ireland played away from home in rugby back then, they didn’t have an anthem.
On 25 May, 1987, when Ireland played Wales in that World Cup opener, they needed one.
The powerful and beautiful Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau first rang out. Then came the dirge of The Rose of Tralee. As Con Houli