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Does Tiger ever come second? He did at the US PGA championship this year and was very angry about it. So were his throngs of supporters, who expect only the best from this golfing great.
He had shot his lowest score (64) in a final round at a golfing major and he had just come back from a long layoff due to injury.
The second coming?
That’s just what Tiger Woods did last week when he finally registered his first win on the PGA tour since 2013. Except this win was special because Tiger’s fans and foes had resigned themselves to some kind of theorem that his back injury had all but written the epitaph on his final golfing hole. Tiger had experienced the kind of injuries that led to most of his naysayers writing him off.
Nick Faldo, one of the game’s most prominent announcers and winner of six majors, mentioned that Tiger had whispered to someone two masters prior that the pain was unbearable and he was quitting.
Woods would later confirm this in a television interview with ESPN.
Quit?
That would have been the end of a lot of us. Thursday evenings would have had to be recalibrated, whatever that means.
What to do?
But not everyone was a dog in the manger and the best tweet to come out of the tour in the past two weeks was from the Englishman Tommy Fleetwood, who, after being paired with Tiger at the Tour Championship and seeing the legend card a 5 under 65 in round one, said on Twitter: “Tiger is good at golf.”
Fleetwood, a promising golfer from the UK, was even cocky enough to wish for a Tiger pairing at the Ryder Cup this weekend. He got his wish and the cup is under way.
As simple as that tweet was, it said it all. Tiger, simply stated, is good at golf. And other things, too, some would add, including ducking golf club swings from other quarters in the middle of the night. Which is why all of us who stay up at night to watch this man play great shots and bad shots – as in dumping the ball into the water, hitting stray drives, swearing under his breath, missing “gimmes” and draining 50 footers (15m) – follow him like sustained nuclear fusion.
He is more special than the special ones.
He has fed all of us a magic potion no pilgrimage can replicate. And boy, have we gorged ourselves on the darned thing. No one can explain this. Forget the throngs that follow him like a messiah on the course. It seems the congregation has grown bigger with the second coming, much to the embarrassment of those better ranked than him on the world golfing standings. Lest we forget, he was ranked at number 656 at the end of last year. Nothing to be proud of. Embarrassing, to be exact, thanks to the injury. Not Tiger’s fault.
The assembly followed him, nevertheless. They followed him more than anyone on the tour when he returned from injury.
I belong to a WhatsApp group that plays competitive golf every Saturday. Poor souls. They are victims of the imbibed Tiger potion. They stay up on Thursday evenings. These are important people. Captains of industry, who need to get up and go to work on Friday mornings to save our economy and the business world. Make money.
But they stay up To witness the good and the bad shots. We have a language we use when the special one is on the course. We swear with him. We call him names, we tell others not to speak ill of him. We even implore the young members of our school not to cast a spell and “wish” bad shots on him. We commiserate. We spend lonely, wistful nights when he loses. And he has lost many times this year. Yet we have lived in hope. We have cherished and enjoyed the good shots.
And, this week, he came back. He won. As he walked down the 18th at East Lake on Monday, battling tears of joy as victory loomed, there were millions of worshippers choking on their own torrents in simpatico. Both on the course and at home on their couches. His second coming finally led to victory after five years. Tiger will win again. And grown men and women will shed more tears. It’s normal.
