Oliver Brown Make Tiger captain in 2023 – he must not be lost to golf
Hunlike with Bolt, if Woods has suffered career-ending injuries, such a legendary figure should be given a role Their absence from competing can create, for the finest champions, a helpless sense of drift
No matter how high in sport you soar, the lurch into irrelevance can happen with frightening haste. It is a reality with which golf, deprived indefinitely of its greatest cash cow in Tiger Woods, must soon grapple.
For while his recovery from compound leg fractures will fascinate for weeks to come, several prominent surgeons argue it is more likely than not that he will never play the game professionally again.
What then? Does he simply retreat, Greta Garbo-like, into the confines of his opulent home? Months have been known to pass in Woods’s world without any update as to his activity or health. Now that any comeback looks more improbable than ever, the worry is that such a tendency will only be exaggerated.
Woods, it cannot be emphasised enough, owes his public nothing. If he chooses to see out an enforced early retirement with the reclusiveness of Pete Sampras, who once referred to himself as the Howard Hughes of tennis, that is his prerogative. But should the bleakest medical outlooks for Woods’s injuries be confirmed, golf needs to find a means, however creative, of keeping him in the fold. For the reduction in the sport’s exposure that would come from simply disappearing hardly bears thinking about. Even in a nonplaying capacity at last weekend’s Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles, where he was described as looking “exhausted” and “zoned-out” during his one TV slot, he was the biggest draw in town.
An absence from competing can create, for the finest champions, a helpless sense of drift. For an illustration, look at Usain Bolt, the only figure to whom Woods can legitimately be compared for domination of his sport. For his curtain-call at the World Championships in London in 2017, the watershed for track and field was palpable. The night after his hamstring popped during the sprint relay, Bolt took the stage alone for a lap of honour, bowing his head in prayer at the starting blocks for the 200 and 100metres. “I almost cried,” he reflected later that evening. “It was close. I was saying goodbye to my events.”
It was difficult to suppress a concern for how Bolt would fill his days without them. That feeling proved well founded, given the lack of purpose he has shown over the 3½ years since. First came the dismal, publicity-seeking campaign to make the grade as a professional footballer.
At one stage, he was offered a trial at Borussia Dortmund, a somewhat generous gesture when one of his team-mates at Australia’s Central Coast Mariners had accused him of having a “first touch like a trampoline”, claiming that the experiment was a “kick in the teeth to the professionals in the league”.
Then, recognising that his sports life was over, Bolt settled for the hamster-wheel of commercial engagements. The sadness was that he could not combine this with more ambassadorial work for athletics as it toiled to adjust to a future beyond him. In 2018, he deigned to turn up at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, for a handsome fee. The hope was that he could electrify the event by his presence. Instead, he did little more than dance at the closing ceremony with the mascot, a blue koala. The impression was of a superstar emeritus struggling to work out his next chapter.
So remarkable are his records, Bolt has earned the right to spend the rest of his days luxuriating either at his Jamaican mansion or at the bar he owns in downtown Kingston. After all, it seems to work for Chris Gayle. It is simply a pity that Lord Coe, who heralded Bolt as the “Muhammad Ali of athletics” at his final event, could not work with the sprinter on finding him a more substantial place in the sport he left behind, perhaps as a mentor unearthing the next wave of Caribbean talent. Instead, his colossal star voltage has been allowed largely to vanish. There are, encouragingly, some tangible ways in which golf can avoid consigning Woods to the same fate. For a start, the Ryder Cup captaincy is a surefire way of maintaining players’ projection long after their competitive shelf lives have expired. Once, many doubted whether he could ever adapt to the team format, so temperamentally unsuited was he to tolerating a playing partner’s deficiencies. But as leader of the US Presidents Cup side at Royal Melbourne in 2019, Woods was a revelation.
Never mind his 100 per cent win record on the course, his most memorable contributions were delivered behind closed doors. “We had a room full of some of the finest players in the world and when he speaks, we all listen,” said Matt Kuchar. “All of us will look back, with these pictures hanging on our walls, and say, ‘We played for and alongside Tiger Woods, the greatest player ever.’”
If the PGA of America seeks to preserve that precious stardust, and if Woods recuperates sufficiently from the damage to his right leg, then he should be installed as the favourite to captain the US in Rome for the 2023 Ryder Cup. Italy is virgin territory for a golf event of this magnitude, and Woods would galvanise the publicity drive like no other figure. For now, any such decision can wait as he embarks on the long path to rehabilitation. But one cold truth is already staring his sport in the face: while it must accept his role will change fundamentally as a consequence of his car crash, it cannot afford to lose him altogether.
A British athlete has spoken of her shock after a man “grabbed her bum” while she was preparing for a training session on a canal towpath in Birmingham.
Sarah Mcdonald, who reached the semi-finals of the 1500metres at the World Championships in 2019, was warming up when the incident occurred. She says she will report it to police.
“Unfortunately, I experienced something that wasn’t acceptable,” she said. “While warming up for my session, two men passed me on a moped, slowing down so the man on the back could grab my bum.
“As a runner, I’ve been heckled, but this was completely different.
Thankfully, I wasn’t alone as it could have been worse, but this has been a wake-up call.”
As an elite athlete, Mcdonald has had access to proper training facilities during lockdown, but a number of female Welsh sprinters locked out of tracks and forced to train in public have said they had been verbally abused by strangers.
Rhiannon Linington-payne, the former Wales 400m champion, told the BBC: “I’ve had inappropriate comments about my figure, wolfwhistling, cars slowing down to stare. I’ve even had a beer can thrown at me.”
Wales sprinter Hannah Brier said: “I don’t feel safe where I’m training now. I find myself going through my wardrobe and picking outfits that I think are not as revealing.”