If you have ever touched a club; in putt-putt where your shoe-straps and lime green ball match, or have shot even par at Pebble Beach with your buddies; you have no idea.
At the professional level golf is like trying to be a fighter pilot without actually ever flying anything but coach. (Yet, it always seems to work out in the movies.) It’s like running on molten lava with snowshoes. It’s like putting together a scrapbook in one sitting without going crazy. The ‘average bear’ can’t even begin to know what it’s like.
Tiger Woods is finished. Eighteen is still in his sights, legally, (If you know what I mean) but not on the course.
He has NO shot at overtaking the Jack "Golden Bear" Nicklaus as the best golfer to ever live. A year and a half ago it seemed like a sure thing, but now it’s about as far away as the moon is to a NASA astronaut.
Woods changed the game, he changed culture. Ten years ago the fist pump was outdated, now people do it when they successfully place a stamp perfectly in the corner on their first try. Ten years ago if you wore red on Sunday they’d lock you up (Cold War anti-communism campaign, joke), now the street malls look like the ketchup aisle at the grocery store on Sundays. Ten years ago a bald man with glasses talking golf was only your uncle on stool, now SVP has his own radio talk show. (Interestingly enough, he’s most likely still on a stool.)Ten years ago African Americans were still trying to prove themselves to the golfing world. Ten years and one Tiger Woods later, it’s all changed.
Publicly Woods will be ridiculed for the remainder of his years; his triply reconstructed swing will no longer be dissected and emulated by drones of mediocre golfers; his endorsement deals will coincide with the likes of Kim Kardashian rather than Billie Jean King.
Tiger Woods will not go down in the ‘record books’ as the best golfer of all time. He will not surpass Jack, no way.
But Tiger did something no golfer has ever done; he’s raised the par.
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