Tiger Woods He Is Risen. Again
Tiger Woods’ career seemed over. Then came Augusta. Brian Wacker reflects on an unexpected renaissance.
Tiger Woods' career seemed over. Then came Augusta, an unexpected renaissance.
The Godfather III’S main protagonist, Michael Corleone, is trying to become a legitimate businessman and leave behind his life of organised crime when he finds out that he’s been double-crossed by his mafia pals. He utters the immortal line: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Similarly, just when Tiger Woods seemed to have made a Lazarus-like recovery to win the Masters, then disappeared and became seemingly disinterested, he re-emerged and made more history by tying Sam Snead’s record of 82 PGA Tour victories with a win at the Zozo Championship last October. Just when we thought Tiger was out, he pulled us back in again.
Tiger’s tale is a joy to watch, yes – certainly more so than the third instalment of the Godfather movies – but leaves one to wonder: Why can’t we quit Tiger? And why can’t we make up our minds on him?
On the first question, one reason is that for a decade he wasn’t just some oncein-a-lifetime talent, but someone whose presence would hover over and carry the sport for generations. And who wants to see someone like that exit stage left so unfittingly? Another is that unseemly part of his legacy, that weird and sudden tabloid spiral his life had taken, leaving fans to feel like they were being robbed of something that was for so long preordained – particularly in a time when ageing athletes in other sports (Roger Federer, Lebron James,
Tom Brady, to name a few) continued to defy that age old cliché Woods himself has often trotted out, Father Time, and trick everyone into thinking how the greatest of athletes might rule their sports forever. But another explanation is simply nostalgia.
For as long as games have been played, each generation has insisted that the world they grew up in was better than the current one, sporting icons included, and golf is no exception. Nostalgia is a pillar of every game, every sport. But the reality is that the best in sports is always happening in the present because the games themselves and the people playing them evolve.
Emotionally, of course, it’s a different story and that, at least in part, is why Woods doesn’t just continue to move the needle in golf, he remains the needle, despite being past his expiration date (or at least so we thought). There is no replacement for him, either, because, with no disrespect to the current generation, there is none. So we hang on.
Which brings us to the second question and why we just can’t make up our minds on Tiger. Yes, there’s the emotional attachment, but also the way in which Woods continues to reinvent himself in all sorts of ways. Off the course, he is largely different than he was in his heyday. In press conferences, Woods has been more forthcoming with the media than ever before. In his interactions with the fans, he walks slower and takes more time. In his relationships with his peers, what was for so long a one-way street is now a road with two-way traffic, with Woods often the initiator of it.
On the course Woods has changed too, toning down the head-on approach of his early and prime years. He no longer has a swing coach. He’s no longer the biggest hitter in the field, preferring to plot his way around the course when the opportunity presents, be it at Augusta or in Japan – at the Zozo he hit 65 percent of his fairways for the week. There’s a fluidity to his swing and movement through the ball that’s
“I KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO HAVE THIS GAME, YOU KNOW, WHAT I FELT LIKE WAS TAKEN AWAY FROM ME, WHERE I COULDN’T PARTICIPATE IN THE WAY THAT I WANTED TO.”
smooth and flat, with Woods getting to his left side with ease. While Woods has always been among the game’s greatest ball strikers, his dominance of the par 3s in Japan to the tune of nine under for the week – remarkably a career best – speaks to that continued evolution.
Woods pulls us back in, too, because what makes his latest act so enthralling – aside from the winning itself, because without that none of this matters – is not just what he has overcome to get to this point, but how he has gone about finding his way back.
There was the five-year winless drought (and nearly 11 full years without a major). The dreaded chip yips and all those skulled shots. The surgeries that left his body broken and with the real possibility of him never playing again, physically unable to at times get out of bed, much less dominate the game with his immense skill, but also his athleticism in a new era of bomb and gouge. And those were just the physical ailments.
After having somehow recovered from the scandal of 2009 and going from the top of the sport to a punchline, back to the top of the game again with five victories and Player of the Year honours in 2013, he again found his way into the tabloids. In May 2017, there was the ugly arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence, slumped at the wheel, the engine running at two in the morning. The charges were later reduced, but Woods followed with a stint in rehab, for what he said was to better manage his pain and sleep medication.
Yet Tiger didn’t just come out the other end, he somehow managed to transform himself from golf’s most dominant figure to its most resilient. “To be able to go through all that to get to where I’m at now, I’m very appreciative,” Woods said last October. “I know how it feels to have this game, you know, what I felt like was taken away from me, where I couldn’t participate in the way that I wanted to. I’m just so happy and so fortunate to be able to have this opportunity again.”
For how much longer he’ll continue to have the opportunities, who knows? But Tiger still gives us reason to hope and to watch. We should also savour these days, perhaps more than the ones we did from his prime, because they are every bit, if not more compelling than anything he did for the first two decades of his career. He keeps pulling us back in, even when we thought we were out. And unlike Corleone, that’s a good thing.