McIlroy: We should just be grateful Tiger’s alive
Car smash could be one cruel twist too many for Miracle Man
RORY McILROY played down expectations yesterday of another miracle comeback by Tiger Woods. ‘He’s not Superman,’ he said. The Northern Irishman grew up idolising Woods’ prodigious feats as a player and had become a good friend by the time Tiger went from being barely able to walk in 2018 to winning the
Masters a year later. However, while believing that performance the ‘greatest sporting comeback of all’, he offered a sombre perspective on the possibility of Tiger (right) regaining his powers this time after Woods’ horrific car crash in Los Angeles on
Tuesday morning. ‘He’s a human being at the end of the day,’ said McIlroy. ‘He’s clearly got some very bad injuries and he’s already been through so much. ‘At this stage, everyone should just be grateful that he’s here, he’s alive and his kids
HOW on earth does the Miracle Man come back this time? Where is even a glimpse of a way back to the majors and their blissful allure?
Tiger Woods emerging triumphant over malevolent twists of fate has come to define the second half of his career.
It is as if some wrathful god is upping the ante every time Tiger defies all logic.
Now, following the devastating car crash that so nearly cost him his life, the grave fear is this will prove one cruel twist too many, and cost him his final years as a player. Will that accident blackspot in the heart of Tinseltown result in a tear-jerking Hollywood ending?
The only thing certain at this stage is that Tiger will not give up. In his downbeat interview with American television during the Genesis Invitational on Sunday, where his face looked bloated and his eyes filled with pain, there were four words brimming with defiance that spoke to the fire that remains within.
Asked if he thought he would be at the Masters in six weeks, following yet more back surgery, he fixed the camera with a trademark stare and replied: ‘God, I hope so.’
He can forget all about that now. Such is the scale of his dreadful injuries, it will be months at best before he is even walking again. It is the Masters in 2022 that has become the big question. And the ones after that.
No doubt before too long he will be requesting Ben Hogan’s biography be delivered to his bedside — if he doesn’t know it off by heart already.
It is a grotesque coincidence that arguably the two greatest ball-strikers of all time should both have been involved in near-fatal car accidents.
In 1949, in dense fog in Texas on another fateful February day, Hogan’s vehicle struck a Greyhound bus head on. In leaning over to protect his wife, Valerie, who escaped with slight injuries, Hogan took the full brunt.
A fractured pelvis, collarbone and a shattered ankle were the least of it. Severe blood clots left doctors fearing for his life. Several told him that even if he lived, he would not walk again.
Just over a year later, a handful of eerie miles from the scene of Tiger’s accident, Hogan won the Los Angeles Open. He played on in great pain for the rest of his career and won six more majors.
A difference is that Hogan was 36 at the time of his accident. Woods is 45, and not a young one at that. Can the advances in medicine these past 70 years outrun the ravages of time?
What we do not know yet is whether there is enough left salvageable of Woods’ battered frame for the marvels of modern science to work their magic.
Looking at the mangled wreckage of his courtesy vehicle that left the road for reasons unknown and plunged down a steep incline, the first instinct was the most basic one of being thankful he survived. Now we fervently hope he is able to walk again and play with his kids.
Alongside those natural human emotions, you can hardly blame the sporting fraternity for wondering what lies further down the road for one of the all-time greats in sport.
What is abundantly clear already is that, even in the best-case scenario, he faces his biggest challenge of all. Far greater than winning the US Open in 2008 with one leg broken and a knee with a ruptured ACL and the public scandals of 11 years ago that left him feeling ashamed and broken. Greater still than resuming each time following four back surgeries, culminating in the comeback triumph we thought topped them all when he won at Augusta in 2019.
In a statement on Tiger’s website following the long hours of surgery, Anish Mahajan, chief medical officer at the hospital where Woods is being treated, detailed the graphic extent of the damage to his right leg.
‘Mr Woods suffered significant orthopaedic injuries to his lower right extremity. Comminuted (splintered) open fractures affecting both the upper and lower portions of the tibia and fibula bones were stabilised by inserting a rod into the tibia. Additional injuries to the bones of the foot and ankle were stabilised with a combination of screws and pins.
‘Trauma to the muscle and soft tissue of the leg required surgical release of the covering of the muscles to relieve pressure due to swelling.’
On American TV yesterday, one doctor opined that without that final procedure being completed quickly, his leg would have been amputated.
Left unspoken and currently unknown is something that could prove even more problematic than recovering full mobility in his leg. Has Woods aggravated the chronic back problem that necessitated a fifth operation just before Christmas and from which he was trying to recover in time for this year’s Masters?
‘There’s not much wriggle room left,’ Woods admitted last Sunday, ahead of a scheduled MRI this week. As he lies in his hospital room, the awful truth is to wonder whether there is now any wriggle room at all.
If Woods cannot play again, we will have to be grateful for the mercy this happened towards the end of his career, and we are left with a highlights reel beyond compare. Woods might have fallen three majors shy of Jack Nicklaus’s total of 18 but, unquestionably, he had spells where he played the greatest golf of anyone who ever lived.
If it proves to be the final tournament of his career, let his closing six holes of November’s 2020 Masters say it all: birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie. Time to keep fingers and everything else crossed for the Miracle Man.