I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my chest when I heard that Tiger Woods was taking an ‘indefinite break from professional golf’ last night.
Until then I had found the story compelling. The perfect role model and the world’s most dominant sportsman was uncovered as a womanising cheat chased out of his own home by his wife brandishing a golf club. The best fiction writers in the world couldn’t come up with stories that good.
But yesterday when I heard the news of his break, I felt like I had been part of a joke that had gone too far. The real victim (apart from his wife and children of course) is golf and all of the young people that play it.
Our relationship begins
From the age of 13 to 17 I played golf religiously. Over the summer holidays I would spend five days a week at the golf course and travel the country playing in tournaments. I started in 1997, the year Tiger won his first major by 10 shots, and for a while it was something I tried to keep under my hat.
Golf and the people who played it weren’t cool. Being a talented golfer gave me no street cred at school. It was all about etiquette, dress code and bank managers. But as I played more as a teenager, Tiger Woods won more as a professional and the whole feeling and image of the game went through a revolution.
Golf became raw, dynamic and exciting when Tiger played and everyone I played with wanted to be Tiger Woods, including myself. Golf would look extremely different now and be played at a lower standard if it wasn’t for the emergence of Tiger. Even his name was cool!
As soon as this commercial came out, people on golf courses all over the world practiced this as they waited on the tee.
The tide turns against Tiger
But people have become frustrated with Tiger in recent years, especially the media, for keeping himself so private and not using his platform to take a greater stance against issues like racial inequality. But for me, just by playing golf with so much flair, aggression and skill Tiger Woods was making the best contribution to the world he possibly could.
So the whole thing leaves me questioning, if there wasn’t such a media frenzy around him, would he have taken this decision? Now I feel he has been hounded into a corner by the showbiz press with extremely sad consequences.
My hope is that this is a public relations strategy that makes people like me feel sorry for him as opposed to disgusted at his behaviour and he will be back on the golf course within the next few months. If Tiger is away for any longer and doesn’t manage to recapture what has made him so unique for the last 12 years then golf will have lost its biggest asset.
Golf will have lost this:
