Celebrating the story of Tiger’s golf
Mark Keohane, writing for IOL Sport
I loved watching Tiger on the prowl in the final round of any Major. The intensity, the expectation and the invariable delivery of unrivalled brilliance combined for enthralling viewing.
There was nothing quite like Tiger in his prime. There hasn’t been anything for me since Tiger tore down the house of golf and made it his own.
There have been and are wonderful golfers, but none gets the pulse racing quite like Tiger.
At least none got the pulse racing quite like Tiger.
His 15th Major win, against all expectation and 11 years after his 14th, was one for the romantics, but it was the nature of his previous 14 triumphs that defined him as the greatest of his generation.
I always enjoyed playing golf in my teenage years, but as an adult Tiger made me want to watch golf, more specifically, Tiger on that fourth and final day dressed in red.
The fall from grace that followed his 14th Major was as spectacular as his golf and his personal troubles were as documented as his professional exploits. His multiple affairs were given as many column and onscreen inches as his lowest and highest scoring rounds of golf.
His marriage fell apart, his golf went the same way and life as we once knew it, or thought we knew it, with Tiger was no more.
In the last decade, as a Tiger fan, I willed for that early dominance again. I knew it was fanciful thinking, but every now and then he’d produce that one or two rounds that spoke to the legend of Tiger and not the ghost that struggled through four rounds and, at times, never made it to the final two rounds of a tournament.
It was Tiger’s golf that I fell in love with. His personality, or reported lack thereof, wasn’t the reason I wanted to watch him play.
The softer and more accessible Tiger, who fronted the media in the past five years, was also not the reason I wanted to see him rekindle those glorious days in which it all started with a first PGA Tour victory at the Las Vegas Invitational in 1996 and a first Masters title, at the age of just 21, in April, 1997.
Tiger’s story has become his struggle when his story should only ever have been his golf.
My heart sank on Wednesday morning when I saw the headline that Tiger was in hospital, having been cut from the wreckage of a car accident.
Reports said he was alive but the wait for his condition took an eternity.
His one lower leg was crushed, his ankle was a mess and he had already been operated on.
I felt a sense of relief that he was alive because the memory of Tiger Woods simply couldn’t be that it would end with him speeding to a 7.30 celebrity tee-off, for which he was running late.
Woods, the golfer, never ran late. Woods, the person, clearly was as flawed as you and I.
In November, 2009, just a year after he had won his 14th Major, he crashed his SUV into a tree and a fire hydrant outside his home in Florida.
In 2010 he was divorced, with his second child Charlie just a year old.
Thereafter, his life was in freefall.
Golf’s modern god resembled a rank amateur shooting in the 80s and I am sure I was not alone in asking for just one more moment of Tiger.
We got it with his incredible victory at the Masters in April 2019.
And while the romantic in me dreamed this was another start for Tiger, the realist knew it was the end.
Thankfully, this is only a tribute to his golf and not an epitaph to a 45 year-old life.
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