TIGER NEEDS HELP
Woods was broken at the Ryder Cup but golf can’t afford to lose the man who is its biggest star
HE LOOKED EXHAUSTED, HIS WORDS SLOW AND SLURRED
ASAD cameo played out in Paris last week that went all but unnoticed amid the now-traditional round of recriminations that follows the nowtraditional American defeat in the Ryder Cup. When Tiger Woods arrived at the post-competition press conference, he shuffled into the giant media marquee at Le Golf National like an old man. His eyes were hooded and dead. His face was expressionless. He looked beyond exhausted.
He managed to answer a question as he sat on the dais but his words were slow and slurred. His speech had been like that most of the weekend but it had gone unmentioned. Now, everyone noticed it but nobody wanted to comment on it. It was a big room and there was an awfully big elephant in it.
The last question came around, the one that caused all the controversy, the one put to Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed about whether they were surprised they hadn’t been paired together by US captain Jim Furyk.
Spieth answered it before Reed could. ‘Jim allowed it to be a playerfriendly environment,’ Spieth began. ‘And we were involved and we thought that the teams that came out of our, you know, fourman squad, what do we call it, fire team? What is it, Tiger?’
Spieth looked along the row of hollow men to where the player who might be the greatest golfer there has ever been sat towards the far right of the dais. Woods stared straight ahead. He didn’t acknowledge Spieth’s question. He wasn’t being rude. He just wasn’t aware of it. It was as if he were in a dream.
Spieth stared along the line again, searching for help, aware that this was a potentially incendiary topic, aware that, as Reed admitted later, Reed was about to ‘light up the room’. He looked at Woods and looked at him again and got nothing back.
‘We thought that we had two teams,’ said Spieth and then trailed off.
He looked at Woods one last time and realised he might as well be addressing a brick wall. ‘Too tired to talk, Tiger?’ he said.
It felt for a moment as if Spieth were goading Woods. But Spieth is too decent a man ever to do that. Perhaps it was just a misplaced attempt at humour.
Perhaps it was just that, for some of us, the memories of that police footage of Woods, close to catatonic and struggling to walk in a straight line after he had been found asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes in the middle of a Florida road in May last year, are still too vivid.
Woods was not as far gone as the night he was found by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s men having ingested a cocktail of painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, sleeping pills and marijuana. He had just pushed Jon Rahm, one of the best golfers in the world, all the way to the 17th hole in a tight singles defeat. But, still, it was clear that something was wrong.
Woods (right), who had spinal fusion surgery last year, had been driven right to the edge by the exertions of the last three days in France. He had played tournaments in seven of the nine previous weeks. Was his slurred speech and strange behaviour a result of trying to manage the pain with medication? It felt that way. For him, the Ryder Cup had become a physical ordeal.
This vision of Woods, 42, did not fit with the narrative that all his troubles are behind him. This vision of Woods did not fit with the idea that he is reborn and his troubles have flown away.
That is what we have wanted to believe these past few months as his wonderfully unlikely comeback has gathered pace. And we wanted to believe it even more when he won the Tour Championship a fortnight ago.
Sport loves a redemption story and the idea that Woods, suddenly on the verge of the world’s top 10, might yet rescue something from the ruins of his personal and professional lives and ascend once again to the summit, happy and healthy, was especially seductive. Until the Ryder Cup, we had persuaded ourselves Woods was as good as new. People talked again about how he would surpass Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 Major victories. People said there was no reason he couldn’t play on for another 10 years. But the Ryder Cup was a reality check. Not because Woods went 0 for 4 and not because he lost a singles game in the competition for only the second time in his career. But because this is a man who is still clearly in a lot of pain and a man who clearly needs help to get him through. In the days that have followed events at Le Golf National, any disquiet about Woods’ condition has been lost in the furore over Reed’s accusations that Spieth did not want to play with him and that Furyk ran the US team on a ‘buddy system’. Reed infuriated many by saying Woods had apologised to him after they lost to Tommy Fleetwood and Francesco Molinari. That seemed to break a confidence and demean a great of the game. Debilitated though he was, Woods still played better than Reed. He deserved better than that casual disrespect.
The Ryder Cup reminded us quite how much Woods has suffered and how superhuman the effort he made must have been to get back to within touching distance of his old triumphs again.
And it reminded us that, for all the claims in his resurgence we have been witnessing the greatest sporting comeback of all time, the reality is rather more painful, more distressing and more complicated. Lost in France, Woods looked like the man at the end of a comeback, not at the beginning of it.
I hope that’s not true. Most sports fans will hope the same. But nor would it be fair to pretend Woods was fine in Paris. The reality is that, however much we might want him to be back to normal, he isn’t.
He is going to need help and patience if this comeback is to continue. He is going to need people to tell him it will damage his health and his dignity if he keeps reducing himself to the state in which we saw him in Paris.
Golf never really replaced him while he was away. It needs him more than ever. But the game, its sponsors and his sponsors, have a duty of care towards him, too.
We watched the world’s greatest golfer sail to the edge of the world and topple over it once before. Let’s not do it again.