SAINT TIGER
Masters cast delivered more slobbering Woods worship
“NOTRE Dame Cathedral Burns! Tiger Woods Unharmed!” Every time know-better sports fans turn on a TV, they’re at immediate risk of being insulted as too stupid to know better.
Tiger Woods is the best golfer most of us have ever witnessed. Agreed? Agreed. To that end, we’ve been blessed. But that should be the end.
So why are our good senses always forced to play defense against repetitive claims and portrayals we know not to be true?
For the first 20 years of Woods’ pro career, TV audiences were told and sold, despite ample, often TV-conspicuous evidence to the contrary, that he’s the greatest guy on the planet.
Now? We’re told he has changed, matured, grown friendlier and more humble to both become and remain the greatest guy on the planet.
For crying out loud, he’s a human, loaded with corresponding flaws. He’s not a deity.
Yet, this Masters was another four-day TV worship service officiated by the Rev. Jim Nantz, the Masters’ pastoral pastor from a pristine pasture over which CBS would pipe in recorded chirps from birds never before seen or heard south of Duluth.
“I get the sense,” writes reader Frank Tredici, “that Nantz doesn’t think I Iove my kids as much as Tiger loves his.”
During Friday’s second round, after a brief rain delay, Woods missed a short birdie putt on 12. He hit it a tad firm, thus it lipped out. Then, on 13 and as so often happens after a too-strong putt, he left a short putt an inch short.
Nick Faldo: “That rain got him, right there. Made the difference.” Dottie Pepper: “I would agree.”
What hath God wrought?! Now Woods was the biblical Job! Though conditions were the same for all, deliver him, and him alone, from evil!
Insulting, mawkish, predictable.
Reader Bill Bingham on Saturday’s third round: “I half expected CBS’s leaderboard to read, ‘ Two
Guys -12, TIGER WOODS –11. Some other guys -10.’ ”
Woods’ win Sunday was significantly aided and abetted by leader Francesco Molinari, who made two double bogeys in the last seven holes. It was reminiscent of Jordan Spieth, who similarly blew the 2016 Masters to Danny Willett.
While the big story from 2016 was that Spieth blew it, Molinari’s gift was reduced to, at most, the parenthetical, so as not to ruin the big Tiger comeback story.
And when Woods won, Faldo gushed, “After all he has been through.” Yes, The Greatest Story Ever Told. Soon, “the greatest comeback in golf history” angle took flight.
Comeback? Comeback from what? OK, back surgery.
But also a riotous, cops-called, caught-sexting marriage? Hookups with hookers? A DUI opioid bust followed by drug rehab? An Olympics-banned “special” doctor regularly flown in from Canada to treat him until he was arrested and convicted for possession of illegal, mislabeled drugs?
Want a heroic comeback? In 1949, Ben Hogan likely saved his wife’s life when he dived across her body from the driver’s seat a moment before a bus, blindly passing a truck, slammed head-on into their car.
The butcher’s bill: Double fracture of the pelvis, fractured ankle, broken ribs, near-fatal blood clots. At 5-foot-9, he played at 150 pounds but lost 20 pounds as he spent the next two months hospitalized.
Sixteen months later, Hogan won the U.S. Open.
None of this sickening TV slobber is Woods’ fault, even if Team Tiger has penalized those TV interviewers whose questions of Woods it didn’t like with loss of access. That helps explain why Woods’ interviews produce dry, nervous questions — “What do you take away from this?” — and vacuous answers.
CBS and NBC years ago determined that they were going to sell Woods for every ratings point he was worth, no matter how shamelessly, dishonestly and transparently. To Hades with heretics who’d rather Woods be seen and enjoyed only as a superior golfer as opposed to someone peddled as far more, someone they know he isn’t.
And so we now pass from TV’s Old Tiger Testament to TV’s same old New Tiger Testament.