I have never watched a game of golf my entire life. I don’t know the rules or the finer nuances of the sport. But Tiger Woods’s comeback isn’t just a golf story. It’s a comeback story for the ages.
At the heart of any inspiring story, any comeback, is redemption.
The wronged person sets things right.
The loser becomes the winner.
David becomes Goliath.
The ordinary man becomes the superhero.
The sinner becomes the saint.
The lost soul becomes the savior.
While all super-hero movies follow this tried and tested formula, every once in a while, real-life allows us to witness it for real.
After a 12 year long wait, Tiger Woods won a major championship and made one of the greatest ever comebacks in the history of sport, not just golf.
12 years is a lifetime. In most sports, it’s a career itself. But in golf, particularly in Tiger Woods’s career, it’s a lost decade from which one can return.
It’s one thing to watch a sportsperson at the peak of their powers, the world at their feet and everything they touch seemingly turning to gold. It’s another to watch a sportsperson whose powers are waning, struggling against the dying light to conjure up one last feat for posterity.
In between these two is the comeback against all odds – the sportsperson who had obituaries written about their careers, who fell out of the spotlight, who suffered career threatening injuries, whose personal problems were overwhelming – and who then came back to claim what was rightfully theirs.
The journey of a fan and their favourite sportsperson occurs in three parts – worship, disillusionment and redemption. Think of your favourite sportsperson. At first you are over-awed by them. At some point, their failings and frailties cause them to fall from the pedestal that you have built for them. Just when all hope seems lost, they resurrect themselves, guilting you about not having placed enough faith in their super-human abilities.
Turn the clock back to 2009, when Tiger Woods was still at the top of the world, seemingly on course to over-take Jack Nicklaus’s record 18 titles. He then crashed his car into a fire hydrant and just like the water than came gushing out, his personal life gushed out into the open for the whole world to witness.
His dalliances with porn stars, his risqué escapades with more women than he could count, all of which caused him to lose his carefully constructed image, his marriage, numerous endorsement deals and in the years that followed, his greatness itself. One of the world’s most bullet-proof stars was the most reviled. In this lovely 2016 piece by sportswriter Wright Thompson, he speaks to one of Tiger’s closest friends basketball great Michael Jordan. In that piece, Jordan says something that seemed like a foregone conclusion . He said “I love him (Tiger Woods) so much that I can’t tell him, ‘You’re not gonna be great again.'”
In the ensuing years, it seemed that all his efforts to reclaim lost glory were hitting a dead end. It could be argued that a lot of his challenges were self-inflicted and that he had no one to blame for his terrifying fall from grace. He endured numerous surgeries in a bid to keep his body together and if there were any doubts about the pain he was enduring, even that happened under the harsh glare of the public eye. In 2017, he was found hunched over the steering wheel of his car. Blood tests revealed a slew of painkillers in his system and his mug shot showed him with bleary eyes, a swollen face, disheveled hair and a stubble. He looked broken, beaten and scarred.
One of the greatest golfer’s of all time who made millions putting a golf ball into a hole, found himself in hole he couldn’t get out of.
Redemption is a rare entity. That’s the same reason why Tiger’s epochal victory in the Master’s will be remembered for a long time. The world’s greatest golfer turned the world’s most reviled golfer turned the world’s most loved golfer.
Does a better redemption story exist?
April 14, 2019 will go down as a red letter day in sporting history. Tiger Woods’s victory isn’t just a golf story, it’s a redemption story, the story of a sportsman who defied seemingly insurmountable odds and found greatness again. Woods has said that wanted his children to see him win a cup. The last time he won, they were too young to understand how great their father was.
We live precariously through our sporting heroes. In some way, they’re like our second mothers – they aren’t allowed to have an off day, they’re always there to lift us up and the thought of them being fallible is hard to digest.
Through all of his travails, Tiger Woods showed the world how infallible he is, just like the rest of us.
But then after his victory at the Master’s, he showed us just how great he was, unlike the rest of us.
Doesn't everyone read the sports page first? 