Happy to admit Tiger proved us all wrong

ALWAYS admit when you’re wrong, it’s something you have to get used to doing, especially when you’re expressing yourself in such a public forum as writing for a newspaper.

During the worst of Tiger Wood’s problems with injury and everything else that happened to him since 2008, I wrote him off and stated right here that not only would he never win another major, but that he’d never win another professional tournament.

On September 23 last year he proved me wrong on the first count by winning the Tour Championship at East Lake, Atlanta, on the PGA Tour, and on Sunday last at Augusta, a mere two-hour drive from the scene of his September win, he proved me wrong again, by clinching the Masters to bag his fifteenth major title and I must admit that I cheered him all the way to the final green.

However, I’m not the only one who wrote him off and there are a lot well-known golf writers eating humble pie also as I write this on Monday.

I stated last September following his comeback win at East Lake, that while it was one of golf’s greatest comebacks it wouldn’t rank with the comeback by Ben Hogan who won the 1950 US Open at Merion, just eleven months after a near-fatal car crash, which saw him spend six months in hospital with life-threatening injuries and multiple bone fractures.

It might, however, be time to revise that statement and say that perhaps Tiger’s win at Augusta is at least on a par with Hogan’s win at Merion, but you must remember that Hogan won six of his nine majors after that crash.

I’m a huge Tiger fan because he’s good for golf and following Sunday’s win, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see him equal or overhaul Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen titles and surpass Hogan as golf’s greatest comeback hero.

A whole new generation got to see Tiger win a major on Sunday, including his own kids, which was something he hadn’t done for almost eleven years, and with the popularity of the game of golf on the wane world-wide, Tiger’s success might just be the shot in the arm that the game needs right now.

I tipped Francesco Molinari last week as a great value bet at 25/1 and he certainly delivered for anyone who backed him each way, but having heard the news late on Saturday night/early Sunday morning that the final round play would be in threes, and that Tiger and Molinari would be together, I got a bad feeling for the Italian.

Yes, I know, that they played together last year in the final round of the Open Championship when the “Iceman” held his nerve to win his first major in spite of a charge from the “Big Cat”, but it’s different at Augusta and I figured that if it came down to a head to head between the two of them on the back nine with the partisan American crowd roaring on their hero, there could only be one winner and so it came to pass.

Padraig Harrington summed it up perfectly on BBC after the golf was over when he said: “Tiger intimidated Molinari off the golf course”.

Not by anything he said or did, but just by his very presence and the way that he played patient golf and waited to seize the moment.

There were others who had chances to win or even force a play-off, late into the back nine, but I believe that Tiger’s name was on the trophy from the moment that Molinari visited the water for the first time and the rest as they say is history.