Why Tiger Woods will never really be out of the woods

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 10 Apr 2010 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Tiger Woods watches his drive off the 5th tee. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Tiger Woods watches his drive off the 5th tee. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Tiger Woods played a wonderful first round at the Masters, with his 68 taking him within two strokes of leading the tournament. It was his best ever opening round at the tournament. A huge drive off the first tee, which rocketed off his driver as if it were turbo-charged, set up his round.

There never has been any question about Woods’ golfing skills, from the time on television as a tiny boy he showed his prowess in front of the golf tragic, Bob Hope.

The real question is whether he will ever recapture that magic that makes fans idolise him, on and off the course.

My belief is that this special magic is gone from Woods.

I take myself as a sort of marker in all of this.

Before his ugly and disgusting private life spilled out into the public gaze, as if someone had taken a knife to the belly of the beast, I had always barracked for him to win any tournament he was playing in.

When he was out of contention, I usually lost interest in the tournament.

Watching him go through his comeback round, I realised that I no longer identified with him to the extent that it was crucial to my current well-being and contentment that he win. It was more like watching someone like Phil Mickelson, a player who is uncannily good.

But so what?

In golf, there are two players who have been idolised.

Arnie Palmer was the hero of the 1960s. Remember ‘Arnie’s Army’?

You could identify with Palmer because he threw caution to the wind and went for the big shots, even when the conventional route was to play for safety.

That Palmer sometimes duffed his shots only increased his lovability factor. He was human, wasn’t he, like the rest of us duffers.

Or at least, human from time to time.

With Woods, the idolisation flowed from a different source, what could be called the Superhuman factor. At his best, he played in a way we (and none of the other great professionals on the tour) could ever hope to emulate.

So we put him on a pedestal and presumed that this glacial excellence, personified with the intense, unsmiling demeanour on the course, was translated into a life outside of golf that was just as especially excellent.

The seemingly endless stories of liaisons with women on the make and reckless gambling create a seamy, sordid image of Woods. Initially, there was the disbelief that someone so focused and controlled on the golf course could be so reckless off it.

But when you thought about it, there was a consistency in all of the behaviour.

The consistency came from the determination to be an absolute control freak in every aspect of his life. And we have seen this oppressive control freak fault line in his character come through in the way he has tried to rehabilitate himself after his private life became a public embarrassment.

That Nike ad, for instance, which featured a grim-faced, staring Tiger Woods in black and white film, blinking towards the end of the clip, with his father coming back from the grave to ask him: “Did you learn anything?”

We all know that Woods’ father was a womaniser. So what was Woods and his PR advisors trying to tell us in the advertisement?

Coming back to the Masters at Augusta, too, was another manipulation.

The Augusta chairman, Hootie Johnson, gave ‘our hero’ a sort of reprimand. But Augusta did not allow blacks to be members until 1990.

Women still aren’t eligible to be members.

There was no way in this socially unreconstructed Masters ambiance that Woods was going to be heckled or challenged.

The commentators and Woods himself felt relieved by the shouts of ‘Go Tiger’ and ‘We love you Tiger.’

But it seemed to me that the reception was muted.

Tom Watson’s admonition that he hoped Woods would respect the game of golf more with his course demeanour seemed to me to a more relevant observation than the fawning of the commentators.

I reckon that for millions of former Tiger fans and fanatics around the world (and I include myself in this), in a metaphorical sense only, Woods will never be out of the woods in our estimation of him as person we admire and idolise.

We will always be astonished by his golfing ability.

But as an icon, it is over.

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