WHEN TIGER WOODS BURNED BRIGHT

This article was originally written in April 2019 following Tiger Woods’ 5th Masters title.

It may have been Palm Sunday at Augusta but this was fist pump golf. A bogey might be considered an anticlimactic way to win a golf tournament, let alone a Green Jacket, but nothing about Tiger Woods’ fifth Augusta triumph fell flat.

Sunday at the Masters is famed for always producing a roar or two but this time was different. This was the kind of roar that only a big cat can bring and a manicured corner of Georgia soil has surely never resounded to quite this type of music. There were roars so noisy that players on neighbouring tees had to stop. There were roars from far distant greens as scoreboards changed. There were roars and mutterings and yet more roars as people realised this wasn’t just on, this was probable, then likely, then inevitable.

This was a win on lucky minus thirteen, an injury curse unbroken. This was four back surgeries forgotten over four riotous rounds. Ignore the patrons for a moment, nobody has seen Tiger celebrate like he did yesterday, pure, joyous, rapturous, out-of-body enjoyment. In the Butler Cabin, Woods admitted to not remembering what he screamed on the 18th green. He won’t be the only one.

To fully appreciate the 2019 triumph, we need to rewind. Not to injury troubles, or marital strife; not to 2005 and that chip, nor to the back to back Masters titles in 2001 and 2002, or even to the mind-bogglingly clear-cut maiden major win in 1997. Instead, let’s go to 1995 and Tiger’s first visit to Augusta as an amateur. Afterwards he wrote a letter to the members thanking them for their welcome. At its heart was a coming of age announcement. Explicitly and importantly it was here, over four days in the Deep South that, in Tiger’s words, “I left my youth behind and became a man”.

In his own mind Tiger has been bonded to Augusta since. The Masters was where all the greats had won – and where he would win too. His victory in 1997 cemented the bond between Tiger and Augusta; it cemented also the bond between Tiger and his father, who in a hug off the 18th green celebrated achieving everything they had worked towards for years. What it also did was share that relationship with the rest of us. The Masters will always be the tournament where golf changed, where the Tiger years began. It is the garden where the seed was sown, and from that seed, golf sponsorship, athleticism and technology would blossom.

The reason that the atmosphere was so much more charged for 2019’s Masters finale is because more people than usual were united in wanting the same outcome, a Tiger win. Anyone who has followed golf over the last 23 years has their own Tiger Woods story.

Much of the commentary will focus on the comeback. Writers will write about the 674 days that separate Woods’ arrest for a DUI and the fifth Green Jacket. They will talk about the back surgeries and the fact that Woods himself thought he was done, his horizons and goals limited to getting fit enough to walk around with his children. It is a staggering story and one that reminds just why comebacks are so powerful.

Naturally, the moral lessons are attractive. Through comebacks we learn that even giants can fall and get back up, that everyone deserves a second chance. That reminds us too that if the great can be flawed then can we all not in our own ways each be great.

Comebacks demand mental strength and / or physical recovery; they make us embrace vulnerability and problem solving until we find a way back. The dualistic symmetry between rise and fall is also appealing. Rises can get stale, declines are depressing – a comeback melds the best of both, with an uplifting third act to boot.

The mechanics are interesting too. Comebacks push on two sides of an only rarely balanced scale. First, they are unexpected. Second, they are hoped for. If you didn’t hope for it, then the comeback would be an anti-climax, something to be admired but not loved. If expected, then would it really be a comeback at all? Comebacks are effectively the victory of the hoped for over the expected, small glimpses of some of the richest and rarest parts of life. Tiger’s comeback, blending both the mental and the physical, is worthy of immediate entry into the pantheon of sporting comebacks. Many will claim it is the best of all.

The reason this comeback in particular is so powerful, the reason that we look at 1997 and what followed as intently as we look at the fall in the car crash years is simple.

Tiger Woods has produced more transcendental moments over his career than almost any other athlete. He has been monotonously brilliant but also always prone to a mistake, and from that mistake an ever more dazzling response. There is little more thrilling in golf than a perfect recovery shot. We watch sport for escape, for advice, and for excitement but also because we are hoping for an “I was there” moment. And when those moments arrive, they write not just sporting history, but personal history. In turn, we follow the players and teams who provide them to us.

The real magic of Sunday 14th April 2019 was not that Tiger Woods was very good at golf. It’s that we remember where we were at some of the other times he was very good at golf and the people who we shared that moment with. It’s how a moment multiplies and Tiger Woods winning the Masters becomes not a moment in time but a moment in lots of times, a billion different moments shared, and then reshaped and passed on in stories by millions of people spread out all across the world who each have a slightly different moment to associate with a golf shot. That shared but different experience has a unique sort of power, and is part of the reason sport can cut across so many boundaries and disagreements. If you want proof of this, try and find a subject that isn’t Tiger Woods that would get both Donald Trump and Barrack Obama tweeting praise on the same day.

As for me, in 1997, I was a six-year-old being woken up by his Dad to watch what, to him, was about to be history. That back nine at Augusta is the first golf I remember watching, filled with a child’s mix of well-past-your-bedtime sleepiness and isn’t-it-excitingly-late alertness. Yesterday, 22 years on, and thanks largely to the serendipity of the early tee time, I sat watching the same man win the same golf tournament, again on a sofa with my father.

I asked him why he had woken me up all those years ago. He played golf, and I hit small wooden woods round the garden, occasionally over the fence, and only once through a bedroom window. But waking me up in 1997 wasn’t really a golfing decision – it was about witnessing history. He told me how as a pre-teen in the 60s staying with his Godfather, a stickler for bedtimes, he had not been allowed to stay up to watch the moon landing.

That was history not being recognised, a once in a generation, record-setting achievement being skipped in favour of sleep. With Tiger on the prowl and sporting, social history in the making, there was no danger of me being allowed to miss out in 1997.

And so, inevitably, every time Tiger Woods wins a golf tournament, how could a part of me not be transported back to that moment. History becomes as much about the people we shared it with as it does the act itself.

For Tiger too, there is symmetry in the history of winning. Since coming back into contention last year, Woods has talked openly about his motivation, about a desire that his children who had only ever seen golf cause their father pain might see it also cause him joy.

Here was a father wanting, and managing, to pick up the threads of a past life, to make real and present something his children had seen only as past. A return to the top means another memory anchored in time, but this time one to share with his children rather than with his father. For Tiger Woods, 2019 means that the Masters becomes the place that he celebrated first with his father and now with his children.

There are moments in sport that seem so perfectly scripted that you have to wonder if fate reached down and interfered. The branch that plucked Tiger’s tee shot on 13 from trouble in the trees to the middle of the fairway, the twice in two days that his ball found a patron’s footpath with a clear line to the green on 11. At other times, Rae’s creek itself seemed to be rooting for Tiger, snatching the balls of four of the top five and leaving only Woods’ untouched.

Maybe Tiger was meant to win, to tie his relationship to his children to Augusta just as he once had his relationship with his father and his relationship with adulthood. Maybe I was meant to watch Tiger’s return with my dad.

Sunday may have been written. It was definitely red.