His children motivate Tiger
Woods returns to action Thursday in Bahamas
NASSAU, Bahamas – Tiger Woods’ children are nuts for soccer.
His daughter, Sam, 10, and son, Charlie, 8, prefer the game over golf and each plays on the pitch any chance they get. And Charlie is always Lionel Messi when he pops in the FIFA video game.
So it was a no-brainer for Woods to set up a meet-and-greet with Messi when Barcelona and Real Madrid played a match in Florida in July. Messi and teammate Luis Suarez posed with the Woods family before the match.
“Isn’t it neat to meet a living legend?” Woods asked his kids.
He was surprised by the reply. “Yeah, we live with one,” Sam said. Woods, 41, didn’t think his kids knew what Daddy has done in the game. To the youngsters, Woods is the YouTube golfer, the star of thousands of videos populating social media. While the two have been on hand when Woods was victorious — Sam was there when Woods claimed his last two of 14 majors and Charlie was on site when Woods won his last of 79 PGA Tour titles in the
2013 World Golf ChampionshipsBridgestone Invitational, neither has any memory of being there.
“They’ve never seen me in action,” Woods said ahead of his latest comeback at the Hero World Challenge at Albany Golf Course beginning Thursday.
If his back holds up — he’s had four surgical procedures on his spine since
2014, the last one a fusion in April — Woods hopes to return to his golden age in front of his children, who will provide motivation for their Pop to get there.
“When I started coming back for this event, Sam wanted to go out on the golf course with me,” Tiger Woods said. “She just thought it was so cool I was hitting it where she couldn’t see it. She said, ‘How do you see that golf ball? I said, ‘It’s only going about 320, just being a complete smartass about it. Charlie’s the same way; he wants to compete, he wants to play with me, those are things that are special.
“I want them to see what I’ve been able to do my entire career.”
As he returns to competitive golf for the first time in 10 months, other kids are on his mind. Those are the youngsters he’ll face, among them Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Patrick Reed and Justin Thomas. They are among a wave who grew up idolizing Woods.
“In an ideal world, I would like to have them feel what some of my past guys had to go against all those years,” Woods said. “I’d like to have them feel that same play. That’s going to be hard. I mean, I was pretty good.”
To a man, the Millennials would love to see it and compete against it.
“In his prime, he beat the best players in the world and destroyed people mentally,” said Reed, 27.
“I certainly hope he becomes healthy enough to get rounds in, to get tournaments in to where he can kind of get back into where he’s competing week in and week out,” said Spieth, 24. “And if that’s the case, then as long as we stay healthy, I imagine paths will cross at some point.”