Tiger has one priority: beating Nicklaus

Tiger pulled out two weeks ago. Haha.

When Woods opted out of The Players Championship two Sundays ago, criticism came flying towards him like a 330-yard drive.

Why would a guy who has won with a broken leg and torn ligaments withdraw in the final round with what turned out to be a stiff neck?

The answer is simple, Tiger only cares about winning majors.

The guy probably has 10 years left of legitimately contending for major championships. If you count this year, that’s 39 majors left in that span.

The reason he was able to grind it out in the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines was because it was the U-S-freaking-Open. If you had the clubhouse lead through 54 holes, or tied for the lead after four rounds, would you say “you know what, it’s not that big of a deal,”? No, you wouldn’t, and neither would a guy trailing Jack Nicklaus by five major victories for the all-time record.

When Tiger called it quits on the seventh hole at Sawgrass, he had no idea what was wrong with him. He speculated it could be a bulging disk in his neck. Had that been the case, he could have missed a couple months…a.k.a the U.S. and British Open.

It makes perfect sense why Tiger didn’t want to jeopardize two major tournaments for the chance to finish 25th at The Players.

He only cares about majors. It’s not that complicated. He’s reached a point in his career that he’s won so many times and earned so much money that any more of either is nearly meaningless.

He entered The Open Championship today, which will be played at St. Andrews, site of the 2000 Championship when Tiger won the second of the four-part Tiger Slam.

Don’t call him a wuss for not wanting to finish his round, or second guess his toughness. It’s not about playing through the pain. It is about making sure he is in the absolute best shape possible for a run at Nicklaus and major win number 19.

Tiger's not out of the Woods yet

Sunday evening, ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi did what even Oprah Winfrey could not: be the first person interview Tiger Woods one-on-one since November 2009.

I came away from the five-minute segment with mixed feelings.

As usual, Tiger left me with many questions still about what has transpired in his life in recent months, and even years.

He did, however, give some perhaps unanticipated answers.

This was better than last month for Tiger, when he gave a woefully unemotional speech in front of a room of people he selected with more care than a 5-year-old girl constructs her dollhouse.

I won’t say I saw the “real Tiger,” because quite frankly I don’t know who that is. And neither does anyone else, including Tiger.

“I was living the life of a lie…and stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly,” Woods said.

Now he’s getting somewhere.

He finally admitted he was a fraud. It’s one thing to say he’s had “multiple transgressions” and admit to any other wrongful acts, but for him to admit his behavior was fraudulent to even those who care about him most, spoke to me about his character now.

But back to his marriage. How the man has been able to keep his wife from abandoning him already is better than any seven-iron shot out of the rough he’s ever made.

When asked to answer specifically what happened on Thanksgiving night last year, when Woods’ car was found crashed into a tree and the media frenzy that was his life ensued, he said that beyond the legal documents it was a private matter.

He wouldn’t describe a single part of that night, including why he lost control of the car before he even left the driveway.

That’s his bad. If he wants to eliminate speculation from the minds of millions, he’d better come clean on what really happened that night. That doesn’t mean he has to give a play-by-play of what happened, but by holding silent it leads us to believe whatever happened could not have been much worse than we can imagine.

Rinaldi concluded the interview by asking Woods “how do you reconcile what you’ve done with (the love with his wife)?

To which Woods replied, “we work at it.”

How much work are we talking here, Tiger?

Clearly the issues between Elin and himself are far from resolved, yet he is already back in the game of golf, set to play in the Masters two weeks from now.

Tiger Woods doesn’t play golf like you and I play golf. He doesn’t slap a few balls around on the range 10 minutes before his tee-time and ride around in a cart with a cooler stocked full of beer in the back for a couple hours once a week.

Tiger Woods spends anywhere from six to ten hours a day on the practice course, refining a skill so rare that it changed the way the very sport was revered.

That’s a hell of a lot of work. Now he says that to repair his marriage and family, it will require work?

It seems to me like the true priorities of Tiger Woods have not changed all that much.

Let’s face it: when Accenture and Gatorade withdrew their sponsorships of Woods, it didn’t exactly put him in the poor house.

You could say playing golf is an escape for Woods, but do you really expect Woods to tee it up at Augusta for the autonomy of it? If he’s playing in any tournament, it’s because he wants to win.

Put yourself in Tiger’s shoes. He’s taking one heck of a risk by playing in this tournament, even if it is within the fortified walls of Augusta National. He’s facing endless ridicule, not to mention constant pinpoint scrutiny for the duration of his stay in the competition.

Of course he plans on winning! If he doesn’t, the week will all in all be a failure for him. He’s returning to a course where he has won four times in his career in convincing fashion.

A win at the Masters would lift the pressure of the world off his shoulders, and serve as a giant “take that!” to all the critics out there that say he’s lost his luster as maybe the greatest golfer ever.

He has something to prove. If he wanted to play golf as an escape from a living hell, he’d call up a buddy or two, and hit the course every now and then to get his mind off things. Don’t expect Tiger to hack around Augusta for four days and finish in 15^th, only to hear him say anything akin to “I’m very satisfied with the week I had.” It’s not coming, so don’t hold your breath.

I am glad it was Rinaldi that conducted the interview, but I can’t help but wonder what more there is to know about the nature of Tiger’s rehabilitation, his true standing with Elin, and why he thinks he can compete at the highest level of professional golf and repair a marriage that seems so irreversibly damaged at this point only a miracle would save it.

Then again, he’s made a career out of defying the odds.

A Dickens of a Decade: The best of times – and the worst of times since 2000.

Part One

In 1966, Clint Eastwood starred in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” a movie about three cowboys on the hunt for Confederate gold.

Where the phrase for which the movie was named came from is a mystery to this day. Whoever spawned such a term must be cringing in his grave after his expression’s severe overuse.

In no genre of today’s culture is the phrase used more than in sports, where anything from players and coaches to owners, and even fans become the subject of such banter.

Nevertheless, over the past ten years the sporting world followed an unprecedented course; a course that has seen all three components of the worn-out idiom demonstrated to the extreme.

Where there was excellence, there was often greatness and even legend. Where there was shame, there was disgrace and further still, humiliation.

Unlike any era before it, the turn of the millennium brought out more of the worst, along with some of the very best, this world has ever seen.

For Americans, an air of dominance surrounded the Olympic Games and everything that came along with it in the proud country. For a century and beyond, the games meant much more than numbers on a scoreboard or a stopwatch.

The Olympics symbolically give anything and everything a country could ever have: hope, pride, arrogance… or despair, embarrassment, and heartbreak.

In 2000, the games in Sydney saw Rulon Gardner display the heart of an American, conquering the odds to win the gold medal for Greco-Roman wrestling. The story of Gardner, a farmer’s boy from the middle of nowhere…er…Montana, rose up to defeat the Russian Goliath, Alexandre Kareline for the title. Good.

At the turn of the century, Tiger Woods was merely a glimpse of the marketing giant, golf king, and societal icon he would become. One of the biggest steps he took down that path came at Pebble Beach in June 2000. Never before had a golfer annihilated the field in a major championship like Woods did at that U.S. Open.

Fifteen strokes. Fifteen strokes. That’s the margin by which Tiger ascended from mortality and into golfing lore. Nobody had ever seen a major title dangled so far away from them by a single player until Tiger led from wire to wire.

And so the legend began to grow. Good.

Roger Clemens was known as the rocket for the torpedo-like speed accompanying his fastballs. In the 2000 World Series, the moniker may have better been served to describe the short time it took for Clemens to go from beloved star to jerk of the year.

The Fall Classic that year saw New York’s two teams, the Yankees and Mets, square off in a modern-day “Subway Series”. Leading the Mets was the well-liked Mike Piazza, the team’s catcher and one of baseballs “good guys”. Clemens was on the mound pitching in game two when he became the epicenter for one of the most peculiar acts the sports has ever seen.

As Piazza swung at a fastball on the inside corner of the plate, he managed to connect with the pitch, sending the ball down the third-base line, while his bat splintered into two pieces. The barrel of the bat caromed off the ground directly at Clemens, who proceeded to pick it up and immediately hurl it at Piazza.

Without any delay, both dugouts had cleared and the tension in Shea Stadium could be cut with a knife. Clemens denied that the toss carried any malicious intent, saying the he thought he was throwing the ball.

It is nearly as painful to read that statement, as it was to hear. Bad.

Never has anyone’s escape to sports been more imperative than in 2001. On Sept. 11, the fateful plane crashes in the unforgettable terrorist attacks left America desperate for anything to attempt to ease the pain. No part of the country needed that outlet more than the city of New York, which incurred the most physical damage.

The city that for long could be thought of as the most powerful in the world had lost all happiness, until two months later when the Yankees gave them something to cheer about.

Led by beloved captain Derek Jeter, the Yankees shocked the Arizona Diamondbacks with back-to-back extra-inning victories in games four and five. In both games, New York trailed entering the ninth inning, only to be saved by two-run home runs off of Arizona reliever Byung-Hyung Kim.

After all the trepidation, the Yankees revived a city and lifted it back on its feet again. Forget that a few days later, the Diamondbacks won the championship in Arizona on a walk-off single by Luis Gonzalez. The jubilation of those two games in Yankee Stadium was enough to bring the joy back to the heart of Yankee Nation.

The examples of a sports team rescuing its city in such dire circumstances are few and far between. Good.

The Yankees were the principal leader for reawakening the country from its sorrows, but they were fare from the only segment of the realm of sports to come to the rescue of a nation.

The NFL resumed play two weeks after the tragedy, and never before had players been humanized like they were in those first games.

Seeing the biggest, toughest group of men of such prominence brought to tears, some even crumbling to their knees on the field during episodes of remembrance showed the country that everyone shared the same pain, and there was no shame in displaying such emotion. Good.

In January 2002, the country was circling around another team of destiny. This time it was the New England Patriots. How fitting at the time, that the team which bore the nation’s colors on its uniform, had returned from mediocrity and against all odds was making a run towards its first Super Bowl championship.

Tom Brady, the sixth-round draft pick from the year before had taken control of the team when he replaced injured quarterback Drew Bledsoe in the second week of the season. Despite his lack of experience and expectations from the rest of the world, Brady and Patriots ran to a 11-5 regular season and eventually a birth in Super Bowl XXXVI.

In that game, Brady’s bunch (yep, went there) were 14-point underdogs to the high-scoring St. Louis Rams, led by MVP quarterback Kurt Warner. After leading much of the game, the Rams tied the game with a Ricky Proehl touchdown with two minutes remaining in the game. That’s when Brady truly became a legend. He marched his offense down the field, setting up an Adam Vinatieri field goal as time expired to win 20-17.

It was the most impressive game-winning drive in NFL history, and once again, the sporting world was the source of a feel-good story to captivate America when they had every reason to feel sorry for themselves. Good.

See the trend of “good” stories prevailing the sports culture in the early decade? Just wait, it’s about to get uglier.