DANIEL STYLER
<Contributor>
I made a comically large bet with a co-worker this past summer that Tiger Woods wouldn’t break Jack Nicklaus’ record for major wins. Tiger’s fourteen victories are four short of Jack’s eighteen, his last was in 2008, and I felt really good about my chances of winning. Then this past weekend happened, where he easily won the Farmers Insurance Open by four strokes. I thought about my bet, but I also thought about the fact that golf is so much more fun when Tiger is good.
I don’t think it’s particularly easy to like Tiger anymore; not after Rachel Uchitel, the Denny’s waitress, and all the rest. But it’s impossible not to be captivated by him. More than any other athlete in any other sport, he dominates golf coverage. We see every Tiger shot, even when he’s ten strokes back. It never seems like he is fully out of the running, and CBS wouldn’t dare miss the opportunity to allow Jim Nantz to gleefully proclaim that “Tiger is in the hunt/on the prowl/some other tiger-related variant” after he sinks a long birdie putt to trim the lead to nine.
When Tiger was at his best, either 1999-2002 or 2005-2007, watching him play felt like a privilege, like you were watching someone so good at something that you almost resented him for being so remarkable (the same feeling soccer fans, which I’m not, probably get when they watch Lionel Messi play). Sundays were his days; always wearing red, he walked from hole to hole like he owned the course, and he never seemed to shy away from pressure, even knowing that everyone was watching his every move. Not liking Tiger was impossible. He made golf, a sport that I typically associate with old, overly tanned white guys with terrible swings, cool.
And then in November 2009, reports started surfacing that he had been involved in an affair. A couple of days later, he crashed his Cadillac Escalade on his street in an incident that wasn’t really fully explained, though we did here about his wife Elin “rescuing” him from the SUV by using a golf club to shatter a window. A few days after that, a voicemail message was released – left by Tiger for a mistress – and he finally had to start explaining some things. He admitted “transgressions,” made some apologies, and the amount of continued reports made it seem like Tiger had an affair with every woman in America. In the months that followed, quite a few sponsors dropped him, and he made a stone-faced televised statement, using words like “entitled” to describe himself: “I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me.”
He took a break from golf, returning in April 2010 at the Masters. But something was different. For the first time, we had seen a crack in his previously picture-perfect reputation. It’s impossible to quantify the impact that this had on his game, but it couldn’t have helped. Tiger was and still is a very private person. All we really knew about him was that he loved his Dad, was sad when his Dad died, and that he was really good at golf. That had certainly changed. He’s also a perfectionist, never happy with anything but first place; it would make sense, then, that it would bother him to no longer be portrayed as perfectly as he had crafted his image in the years leading up to the reports of his affairs.
There was also something different about watching him play. I still cheered for him, but it didn’t feel as natural as it used to; it felt dirty. He was also injured, playing in only nine events in 2011. And while he was still good (and better than almost everyone else), he wasn’t the same. He had no wins in 2010 or 2011, and three in 2012. And there were no majors added during that time.
Seeing Tiger win this past weekend in his first start of the year was refreshing, if only because it reminded me of how great he can be. I have always thought that sports are at their best when there is a dominant team or athlete involved. Parity is kind of boring and forgettable. Dominance is memorable. And there was no one as dominant as Tiger.
Because of this, part of me wants to lose this bet. I want Tiger to be not just good, or great. I want him to be dominant again, and show Rory McIlroy what it really means to be “The Best Golfer in the World.”