WORLD BASKS IN THE TIGER WOODS PHENOMENON
After Tiger Woods’s winning display at the Masters, Joe Shute recalls other plucky personalities who have returned for a second act
From Comeback Kid tears, to earning a presidential medal, golf has brought a smile to the world since the big man’s return
When Tiger Woods was busy winning his first Masters championship in 1997, he presumably had neither the time nor inclination to read Donald Trump’s then newly published book, The Art of the Comeback.
But consulting the 10 tips for rebound success, written by the man who would be president, one discovers a roadmap for Woods’s own improbable return to the top. In the Trumpian playbook, tip number one is “Play golf”; number 10 is “Always get a prenup”.
Woods’s fifth green jacket proves he has clearly not been shirking at the former, while in 2010, after his career and personal life had gone spectacularly awry, he divorced his wife, Elin Nordegren. A figure of £100m (R1.8bn) was widely quoted to have been the couple’s settlement.
Delving further into the list of Trump’s comeback commandments, they range from the strikingly mundane – “Stay focused” and “Be passionate” – to the two that appear to combine the author’s personal mantra: “Be paranoid” and “Get even”.
Following publication, the critics were unkind to Trump’s self-help tome, with one reviewer calling it a “pointless and ultimately ugly book”, and another “a cock-crowing elegy for his own lost relevance”.
Yet what he did manage to elicit was something perfectly encapsulated by Woods’s tap-in bogey on the Augusta green on Sunday to end an 11-year major title drought: the world loves a Comeback Kid.
Human history is littered with such examples. Former Olympian rowing gold medallist James Cracknell becoming, at 46, the oldest ever Boat Race winner earlier this month; Sarah, Duchess of York making a spectacular return to Royal favour
via two Windsor weddings in 2018.
Rowan Hooper is the author of Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical
Ability, in which the New Scientist journalist, who has a PhD in evolutionary biology, interviewed those who have reached the peaks of human achievement in their respective fields – sporting or otherwise.
He says three characteristics are vital in any great comeback: intense laser-sharp focus, a clear goal, and an absolute passion for what somebody does.
“To do something extraordinary requires those three elements ramped up to the max,” he says.
Hooper admits that there may be something to Trump’s claims that a great comeback is best inspired by a sense of settling scores – but insists that revenge is far from the most powerful motivation in the human psyche.
“Some people deliberately stoke their passion,” he says. “Maybe some people can use the chip on their shoulder to drive them on to positive things. But I found that a positive drive was better than a negative drive. All the people I spoke to who achieved greatness were doing so for positive reasons.”
To this, Mark Wilson, professor of performance psychology at Exeter University, adds a few observations of his own. “Unshakeable belief is key,” he says, as well as being able to “tread the fine line between wanting the comeback badly and sticking to the process”.
Wilson adds that a decent support structure is vital, so too the ability to relish the battle that lies ahead. “By its very definition, no comeback is easy,” he says.
Apple, now the world’s biggest tech company, is worth more than $1-trillion today, but central to its success was firing Steve Jobs, the man who cofounded it in a garage in Silicon Valley... before bringing him back years later to take charge of the company’s remarkable turnaround.
Fashion, too, boasts its fair share of tales of phoenix rising from the flames. In 2012, German designer Jil Sander announced her return to the eponymous label she had previously sold in 2004. (“She’s Back” ran the subsequent headline in Vogue.)
After Jo Malone walked away from the luxury fragrance business she created, selling it to cosmetics giant Estée Lauder in 1999 in a rumoured multimillion-dollar deal, she described the ensuing period as “one of the most unhappy times of my life – worse than cancer”.
In 2011, she launched a new company, Jo Loves, which now turns over undisclosed millions. Though not strictly fashion-related, Kylie Minogue’s 2000 comeback with her chart-topping single Spinning Around was cemented with a pair of gold hotpants, now firmly ensconced in the pop hall of fame – quite literally so as the singer has since donated them to the Australian Music Vault at a museum in Melbourne.
Dr Sally Ann Law says she has seen comeback stories in every conceivable professional field in her 18 years working as a life coach and executive coach.
“These are people at very low ebbs and trying desperately to pick themselves up and believe in themselves again,” she says.
Law believes some of us are better equipped to deal with setbacks and return from adversity, although she says we often tend to fixate upon highprofile stories of comebacks and, in the process, disregard those successes we achieve in our own lives.
“The Tiger Woods thing is, of course, inspirational, but what we tend to overlook is the things we have done for ourselves. We often take our successes for granted and focus on our failures.”—