Even if he never comes back, Tiger made himself whole again that one day at Augusta
IF Tiger Woods never plays competitive golf again, if his existence as one of the greatest sportsmen of this or any other era was ended by the California car crash that shattered his right leg, there are still many things for him to be thankful for. Without being glib, the first of these is that no one was driving in the opposite direction when his SUV veered on to the wrong side of the road south of Los Angeles last week and barrel-rolled into a ditch. His kids were not riding with him. No one else was hurt. Thankfully, Woods, too, will recover in time.
So the only casualty we are discussing is a career. Woods has navigated plenty of commas in an astonishing golfing odyssey that has established him as a sporting, cultural and commercial icon but maybe this is a full stop. Maybe there will be no more comebacks.
And maybe the questions we should be asking are not how long it will take Tiger to return, nor whether it is better for his swing that he injured his right leg rather than his left, nor whether his leg injuries will complicate his back
THE Football Writers’ Association vote for Footballer of the Year comes later than the PFA equivalent and players are already being asked to pick their winner. There is still plenty of the season to go but if I had to vote now, I’d plump for Manchester City’s Ilkay Gundogan. That City have been the Premier League’s best team is not in doubt and, in a talented side, Gundogan has been their inspiration. problems, but rather whether now is actually the perfect time for him to call it quits.
As Rory McIlroy said in the hours after the crash in the face of questions about Woods’ return: ‘He’s not Superman.’
Maybe it is time for golf to let him go and get on with the rest of his life. Maybe it is time for sport to stop clinging to him as if we still depend on him. He is 45 now. Maybe it is time for him to rest.
Perhaps that is simplistic. Perhaps Woods is not built to rest. That is part of the reason he has been such a brilliant sports man. He is hard-wired to compete. That was the way he was brought up. But still, now he has gone some of the way to finding some peace in his life, there is something comforting about the idea that he might be able to take the final step.
There was a time a few years ago, as we were being shown police dashcam footage of Woods trying to walk in a straight line after being found asleep at the wheel of his car because he had taken too many painkillers to try to ease his back pain, when it felt as if his career needed to be put out of its misery.
His golf had been usurped by his personal life. He was starting to become a curiosity first and a golfer second. There was a fascination about his fall. Parts of Orlando, where he lived during his married life, became landmarks in the Tiger Tourist Trail.
I visited a few of them myself. There was the vacant clapboard building on the corner of Conroy and Apopka Vineland that was once the Perkins restaurant where he began the affair with a waitress that led to the end of his marriage. There was the gated estate in Isleworth where he crashed his car into a fire hydrant in 2009, the incident that began an unravelling.
Relatively recently, before he had spinal fusion surgery in 2017, we were told there were occasions he was so debilitated by back pain that he collapsed in the garden of his house on Jupiter Island in Florida and had to be wheeled back into the house on a cart as if he were a sack of sand. It felt as if his career had wound to a sad and pitiful end.
That ceased to be the case when he won the Masters in April 2019. It was his 15th Major victory and his first since he won the 2008 US Open at Torrey Pines and it will be remembered as one of the greatest triumphs in golf and one of the most astonishing comebacks from the depths of physical and psychological despair that sport has ever witnessed.
I sat in the small section of green canvas chairs reserved for the press at the back of the 18th green that Sunday at Augusta and marvelled at what was unfolding as one contender after another fell away so that, by the time Woods walked up that final fairway, the world knew he was going to win.
There is not much in sport that compares, however far you travel. There is not much that can compete with the visceral emotion of that. When you thought a man’s greatness had gone and that it was never coming back, he finds it again and lets it dance in front of you so that it is impossible not to feel a lump rising in your throat and tears welling in your eyes because of the beauty of it. And that is why it might feel right if Woods decided that now was the time to say goodbye to golf. The moment he won the Masters in 2019, he was restored. All the other stuff fell away. It was relegated. He was a sportsman again. The image of that stumbling wreck on the police camera was gone. He was a king again. He was happy again.
The other thing about that final day at Augusta was the cheers that followed him round the course. I could hear them from that spot on the 18 th, rolling through the course’s hills and valleys, explosions of pure elation but also expressions of pleading. Everyone was desperate for Tiger to win. Everyone wanted him to win, more than they’d ever wanted anyone to win a golf tournament.
That was how it felt. It felt as if everyone knew that if he could just do this, he would be whole again. And that nothing else would really matter. And t hat his son and daughter were there to see it. And that he would be free. That he would be released. Maybe now, it’s time for him to put that theory to the test.