BRILLIANCE TOO OFTEN OVERLOOKED AMID MURKY SCRUTINY
MICHAEL JORDAN was one of the interminable distractions of the first lockdown. The Last Dance explored Jordan’s brilliance but also his fearsome competitiveness, and the nastiness that seems an inevitable by-product in the careers of such rarefied figures.
But the extent to which Jordan became a touchstone for what seemed like every second conversation – Normal People took up most of the rest of the space in the national discussion – quickly became tiresome.
There was, however, one mildly diverting off-shoot discussion.
Were a documentary to be made about an Irish equivalent, who would it be?
The predictable slew of names were suggested, while the windswept and interesting set devoted themselves to unearthing the most unlikely and unheralded.
Roy Keane, though, was disdained as a topic, part of the powerful recent trend for diminishing him as a result of his punditry style (predictably and theatrically fearsome) and his time assisting Martin O’Neill with the national team (successful and eventually disastrous).
Just because Keane is a superstar, though, doesn’t diminish his achievements as a player, or make him any less interesting.
He remains the most compelling figure in Irish sport in decades. The more he speaks about the game on Sky Sports, the more it appears his attitudes belong to another time, and the easier his difficulties in management are to understand.
It’s as if his failures since retiring as a player, are enough for some to disqualify him as a significant person in Irish sport.
The influences and passions that shaped him as a boy and later as one of the best soccer players in the world are no less intriguing because he now has an Instagram account and grudgingly banters with Jamie Carragher.
That Keane’s influence has been subject to revisionism is perhaps inevitable for a figure whose greatness is concentrated in the early years of their public lives.
Tiger Woods won 14 of his 15 major championships in an 11year span between April 1997, when he won the Masters by 12 shots, and June 2008 when he won the US Open on one leg. That win at Torrey Pines should be remembered as one of the supreme physical achievements in the history of golf, but it was simply one more way that Woods’ golfing gifts were expressed.
The 13 years since that play-off victory over Rocco Mediate have seen Woods mostly struggle on the course, against increasing physical infirmity, the toll demanded by a lifetime dedicated to the sport, and the advent of a buffed generation of big, hungry hitters.
Off the course, his life threatened to dissolve as his marriage collapsed and the excesses that wrecked it fed voracious worldwide media coverage. Woods the sporting phenomenon was consumed by Woods the notorious public figure, to the point where his 2019 win at Augusta was celebrated as much for its novelty value – the struggling superstar winning against the odds – as for its sporting worth.
The serious car accident that hospitalised him this week was another installation in the Woods drama – or it was certainly reported that way. As was persuasively argued in these pages, though, sometimes a car wreck is just that: it was serious, it could have been a great deal worse, but it was a terrifying episode for Woods that police have speculated was caused by speeding.
It isn’t a surprise that Tiger Woods being involved in such an incident sparks a thousand rumours, given his scrapes in cars in the past. The national broadcaster led their reports with news that police reported no ‘impairment’ on the part of the driver.
That was the first thing many suspected on hearing the news. This was an accident involving a celebrity as much, but probably more, than it was a crash that could have killed one of the most important sportspeople of the past 100 years.
And surveying the coverage since, it is fascinating the extent to which Woods has been recast as a public figure. The man who turned golf into a primetime TV event, whose gifts attracted sponsors and their money to the point that tour journeymen are now multi-millionaires, and whose fame exploded to a level that no other golfer will ever reach, is now more readily framed in terms of tabloid titillation than as a golfer whose rare brilliance transformed not just his own sport, but sport generally.
It seems remarkable to write it, but Woods is in danger of being under appreciated.
It did not feel that way in the 2000s when he devoured courses, opponents, records and dollars by the million.
From the day he won his first green jacket in the spring of 1997, he was bigger than his sport.
This was because he was brilliant, but also how his brilliance was honed by a domineering father.
It was also because he wasn’t white, which, in a sport that remains the preferred diversion of rich white men, and generally the sport of middle-class white men, made him an outlier.
Woods, though, eschewed advocacy in a way that echoed Jordan’s own reluctance to become a spokesperson for black people. Jordan’s famous quote about Republicans buying sneakers, too, was addressed in The Last Dance.
He remained steadfast that he saw himself as a basketball player, not an activist.
That attracted fresh criticism of a kind that Woods would have recognised. His refusal to take political and social stances was scrutinised anew in light of the Black Lives Matter movement last year, and he was criticised afresh.
Woods was not always attractive in how he conducted himself as a player. He was grumpy on the course, and frequently ignorant. That wasn’t pleasant but nor was it the calumny it has been made out to be.
The criticism he faced from within the sport was often sourced in golf’s truly absurd self-worth, and also in racism.
The criticism directed at him from outside was at least in part a consequence of golf’s status; the chosen passion of Donald Trump is not
‘RARE TALENT OF WOODS TRANSFORMED SPORT IN GENERAL’
going to be swept by the spirit of activism. Despite all, Woods’ career remains a sporting achievement that should make the mind boggle.
There was never anyone like him and there never will be again.
He remains three majors off the total of 18 set by Jack Nicklaus, but it would take a particular type of clubhouse bore to try and argue that Nicklaus has had a bigger impact on the game.
But it was because of the sheer scale of his winning, and the force of his gifts, that Woods became bigger than his sport.
His own failings turned his fame into infamy, but the source of his renown remains sporting brilliance.
The man that was cut out of a car in California on Tuesday is past his best, and the severity of his injuries make yet another return seem doubtful.
Yet this was not a story about a celebrity. It was the latest convulsion in what is one of the very finest sporting lives.