Bernie Lincicome: Tiger surely deserves the benefit of your admiration
Surely, Tiger Woods will run out of comebacks. This has to be the last one. Woods has spent half of his career careening from one to another, defining himself by both courage and folly, never losing his place as golf's greatest curiosity, the SBOAT, second best of all time.
Having lost track of Woods' comebacks, both in number and in quality, I will just say this about this one: Conspicuous.
After all, it is the Masters, created by Bobby Jones, pedigreed by Arnold Palmer, sustained by Jack Nicklaus and maintained by Woods. It is a major because Palmer said it was, and racial and gender insensitivity aside, it has become what it has.
So, here is Woods, impossibly back, slight limp, using his wedge as a cane, past the azaleas and under the pines, looking pretty much like an ordinary golfer, and that is meant as a compliment.
However this Masters turns out, whether it is a restart or a reshuffle or a private trial for Woods, it meets the bar of fascination that Woods has set since he was the wonder child of a game that needed every bit of his appeal.
One thought does occur when considering the staggering (no pun intended) story of Tiger Woods. Any game that can be played on one leg can't be that hard.
Otherwise this is all too incredible, a mixture of guts and grit, the eventual result still to be seen.
When Woods was dickering with his golf game, a game that seemed in no need of repair, changing his swing or reinventing his method, then we were ready to scoff.
Or when he removed himself from golf for great chunks of time, it violated all the rules of competition and readiness. Yet rust, like doubt, never collected on the man.
How trivial those concerns seem now compared to this. This is real physical damage, so serious that amputation of his right leg was considered, even now repaired with various toolbox paraphernalia. And that was his good leg. The left one had given him the most trouble.
To see Woods wincing now, his reaction is a tossup between a poor shot and his own physical agony. We don't know.
He is confirmation of the inevitable, that flesh melts, that bones break, that even the greatest cannot escape the attrition of life, repetitious in the case of Woods, too famous for this, too gifted, too careless.
Woods had transformed his body, so lanky and lithe during the Tiger Slam, into a model of physical perfection, with muscles unnecessary for the game he plays but attractive in a golf shirt. His hair now thinner, his jowl jowlier, not yet ready to be an honorary starter, but that will come.
The chance he might return as good as ever supplies additional intrigue to his myth that has grown in unforeseen directions.
It has to be much easier to return in golf than in any other sport - see my original premise - but anyone with the will and heart that Woods has showed must be given the benefit of admiration.
As to how foolish Woods has been to have played when doctors advised him not to, when a career was at stake rather than just a tournament, (consider winning the Open on a broken leg) that is as much his story as his skill.
If this latest bit of damage to his body will have a lasting effect, if he becomes merely good instead of great, if he plays now at the level of all those other very good golfers, if he is no longer Tiger Woods plopping a ball into the hole from impossible rough or birdieing the last hole of the tournament when nothing else will do, that's not such a bad fate either.
In one of the many pieces I have written about Woods over the years, this one quote sticks with me, from St. Andrews, I think, defining the man. "lf you're injured or you're sick or anything, you don't tell anyone," Woods said. "You just deal with it and move on."
He has always dealt with it. How much effort it took to move on in just a bit more than a year from a car crash that could have killed him, nearly crippled him, we won't know until the movie comes out, as it surely will. Maybe I'll write it.