Golf: The End of Tiger Woods
By Dan Daly
The New England Patriots may have won the Super Bowl as a team but Gronk won the parade by himself. He is bordering on GOAT status. Classic!
Warning: Before reading any further please make sure and activate your glutes. Not doing so may result in injury not allowing you to finish this article.
My dad once shot a 64 at Spyglass Hill…on the front nine. He also declared earlier that weekend that he preferred the Spanish Bay golf course to Pebble Beach because “I lost less golf balls there.” I tell you this not to make fun of my dad; he is a proud 30 handicap, god bless him. I tell you this because if you put a $100 bill on the table and dropped 5 golf balls just off a green I would seriously have to think about who I would bet on in a short game contest between my dad and Tiger.
I’ve seen some amazing things in my lifetime as a sports fan. Some good, some bad and some that are just out and out unexplainable. What has happened to Tiger Woods the last 18 months (plus or minus) may be the most shocking thing I will see in my lifetime though. Outside of Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods was arguably the greatest or at least most dominate athlete of this generation. Yet in the last 500+ days, Tiger has finished a final round in an official PGA Tour event…twice. His last nine starts ended; MDF, WD, T25, MC, 69th, WD, MC, MC, WD. That is amazing in and of itself until you consider that he has only had nine starts in that span. This is a guy that once won 7 starts in a row in a six-month span from August 2006-January 2007.
With all of the injuries and stops and starts he has had along the way, I can overlook the missed fairways, loose wedge shots and overall rust that he has had dating back to the beginning of the 2014 season. But I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around his overall short game meltdown in that same span. Outside of maybe Seve (Ballesteros), Tiger was the greatest short game player that has ever played the game of golf and now I would legitimately consider betting on my dad, a 30 handicap almost twice his age, in a short game competition. Now maybe his short game debacle would be less apparent if Tiger was hitting more greens (just 2 of 11 Thursday and 18 of 36 last week) but some of his chip shots recently would be embarrassing in a Friday Country Club game among double digit handicappers, much less a 14-time Major Champion.
It’s gotten so bad that even the folks in the desert have lost full faith in Tiger. A guy that once teed off at the Masters a +125 favorite (Bet $100 to win $125) went off at Torrey Pines this past week, a place he has won EIGHT tournaments (one with a broken leg) at 50/1 odds (Bet $100 to win $5,000). He was -140 just to make the cut. That is so unfathomable to me I don’t know where to begin. This is the same guy that won five tournaments in 2013 and nine tournaments between January 2012 and August 2013, and was No. 1 in the world just eight months ago. To drop this far, this fast is simply unimaginable to me.
I received no less than 25 text messages on Thursday in some way or another referencing steroids and Tiger’s WD/recent injury string. I don’t know if it’s true or not, or if one has to do with the other. I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on TV, but I do know that athletes, in any sport, eventually wear down both in ability and physically. Tiger is no exception. But to this degree? This quickly?
I don’t know if this is the end of the line for Tiger, most would argue that it is, and quite frankly it would be hard to argue against them at this point. But if it is, what a horrible way to go out and a major loss for the sport whether you love or hate him.
While I wasn’t old enough to remember the end of Jack’s career, I do know that after winning nine times between 1978-1980 he only went on to win three more times the rest of his career, but I can’t imagine that it ended quite like this. Maybe I’m naïve or it was just more of wishful thinking, but I always imagined Tiger slowly fading out of contention over time, winning once a year, then once every other year with one last 1986 Masters type run in him as a final curtain call. Never in my wildest imagination did I, or anyone else see this coming. Unable to even finish 18 holes more times than not, sculling and chunking routine wedge shots, a complete head case (which may be the most shocking of all) and simply put, sucking at golf.
And maybe this isn’t the end of Tiger Woods, he did go two and half years between wins from September 2009 – March 2012, but ask yourself this question, if the 11-year-old girl that qualified for the women’s US Open last year played Tiger straight up from the women’s tee’s tomorrow and you had to bet your life on who would win, who would you take? Sure, you would take Tiger, but the fact that a) you would actually have to even stop for one second and think about it; b) the fact that I can even write that sentence with 100% seriousness; and c) it would actually be a close match is all you need to know about Tiger Woods golf game right now.
