ShareThisGolf pundits around the globe, and non-golf pundits too, have turned into Dr. Phil when it comes to their views on what Tiger Woods should do to repair his image, never mind his marriage.
Everybody's more worried about how the business of golf will suffer than how his wife Elin and Woods himself are suffering and will surely continue to suffer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, as the Beatles shouted. So many people are twisting their minds and shouting their ideas. Why isn't anybody talking about what we'll really miss for as long as Woods is absent from the golf course, where he has distinguished himself and set himself so far apart from his fellow competitors?
Here's what we'll miss: a golfer who could hit the shot when it mattered more often than any golfer. We'll miss a golfer with a sense of the dramatic, and the ability to turn tournaments, especially majors, into riveting theatre.
A few examples will make the point.
There's Woods walking from the ninth green to the 10th tee in the first round of the 1997 Masters. It's his first Masters as a professional. He's shot four-over par 40 on the front nine, and he doesn't see anybody as he makes his way to the tee. He's lost in thought.
The question is simple: What happened that front nine? How can it be fixed?
Woods figures that his backswing was too long, and so he lost control.
He shoots six-under-par 30 on the back nine and goes on to win the Masters by 12 shots.
Three years and a few months later Woods is in a bunker to the right of the 18th fairway at the Canadian Open at Glen Abbey. He has 216 yards to the hole, over water. It's the last hole of regulation play. He holds a one-shot lead over Grant Waite, with whom he is playing.
Woods rips a six-iron across the pond. Sure, he fades it a bit more than he wants to. He runs ahead to see the flight and where the ball lands. It's over the flag, and finishes in the back fringe. He makes birdie and wins the tournament.
Five years later Woods faces a next to impossible pitch and run shot from behind the 16th green in the last round of the 2005 Masters. He flips the ball well left of the hole, it takes an almost right-angled turn and rolls and rolls and rolls, settling on the lip of the hole before falling in drunk.
Woods wins that Masters in a playoff over Chris DiMarco.
Three years after that, Woods is on the 18th fairway in the third round of the 2008 U.S. Open at the Torrey Pines. He's playing with a double stress fracture to his left leg, as we'll learn later. Woods can't put any more pressure on the left knee, the source of the extreme pain he's been feeling and showing after some shots.
He can't hit a conventional shot with a long iron, so he aims way left of the green with a soft 5-wood. The ball curves like a half-moon and finishes on the back of the green.
Woods makes the long putt for eagle. The next day he makes a 15-foot birdie putt on that same green to get into a Monday playoff against Rocco Mediate. He wins the playoff, and then leaves the game for eight months to recuperate from knee surgery that he will have that week.
A momentary digression: Nick Price made a 50-foot eagle putt on the 17th green the last day of the 1994 Open Championship at the Turnberry. He won that Open.
People have told Price that he could stand on that green 100 times and not make that putt. His response has always been the same.
"True, but I made it the one time I needed to make it."
Woods made the critical shot the one time he needed to make it so many times it became laughable. And expected.
Now he's leaving golf not for knee surgery and the subsequent rehabilitation, but for what amounts to brain surgery in that he'll need to alter his mindset and approach to life. Can he? Even the real Dr. Phil doesn't have a clue. Heck, Dr. Freud probably wouldn't know, or even hazard a guess.
The business of golf is a bore compared to the game of golf, and the way Woods has played it. Here's hoping he gets his act together off the course so that he can again perform as only he can on the course.
(Contact Lorne Rubenstein at rube(at)sympatico.ca)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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