An open letter to Tiger Woods
· Yahoo Sports
Dear Tiger,
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I am not trying to be glib writing you an open letter. On the occasion of missing your sixth Masters tournament and fourth Champions dinner, not even you would deny how your presence, inseparable from your absences, has defined the space of Augusta National for one week every April across 30 years. You have been like the weather. Galleries swell and shift according to your path and patterns; comments and predictions about your status become a form of salutation on the grounds. This sleepy southern city is just the eye, of course. Hundreds of millions across the world track you so closely this time of year.
It was a nice morning here. The faint grumble of workers making last preparations under diesel floodlights as well as the waning moon our astronauts circled yesterday. As an early practicer, you know how the blackness fades to green in the first natural light and reveals the turf totally pristine but for a few sets of tire tracks cutting the dew (you know they’d erase them if they could). The first patrons set out briskly shouldering their folding chairs then washed up one and down ten and eighteen like a wave broken in so many directions. Up by the clubhouse lawn and on the veranda, waiters in white jackets with silver coffee urns darted among ladies and gentlemen as the sun slowly gained strength through the branches of the giant live oak. Do you miss walking under ‘The Tree’? You always strode past it so quickly and with such purpose, gaze either down or a thousand yards away, preserving some invisible shell thicker than the one created by your circle of guards.
Even though you aren’t here, you are here, dispersed in memories across these 350 acres. Your history is a third of the tournament’s history, but your predomination in the consciousness of anyone alive today is a number that approaches one. All but the youngest of us can’t watch Scottie, Rory, Ludvig—or whoever the contenders might be—hit shots without comparing them to shots you hit.
This year, you teased that you might tee it up. Another back surgery in October effectively wrote on the wall that you would only come for ceremony, but you didn’t refute the idea outright. Surely those swings on TGL were more than a business convenience to juice ratings. This little playfulness remains a rare spot of encouragement amid an otherwise discouraging situation. It tells us . . . something. There’s a human tendency, especially from people on the outside, to want clarity in what comes next. We find it hard to appreciate that the future will unfold according to so many small decisions that add up in circumstances that are also in flux. You have asked for privacy as you attend to your health, even asked the judge for permission to leave the United States to seek that privacy as you also seek treatment. Any golf fan in touch with being human must respect that. But that doesn’t mean we can’t wonder what’s going on inside your mind and heart and about what exactly needs to be treated.
Is there relief in not being here? I’m sure it’s a mix of ambivalent emotions for which maybe there isn’t a word. At least not one that would belong or be understood in a press statement.
You’ve played 100 tournament rounds at the Masters, made 24 straight cuts as a professional and won five green jackets. None of these statistics or others describe with any accuracy the void you’ve left this week. Nothing lasts and your transition away from competition has been underway for some time, so maybe you find it absurd or reaching to pin extra significance to this spring. You didn’t play the Masters last year, either. Let the weight of my accomplishments feel heavier, more immovable, when I am not here to potentially add to them, maybe you say.
The story of your career officially started with an open letter. “Hello, world” you said or wrote or was written for you on your first Nike commercial. How that story ends depends on a thousand things, which is an easy sentence to write as the breeze flutters pink azalea petals downward to the ground where they mix with dead pine straw and are trampled underfoot. But something tells me you are too stubborn to allow an ending that incomplete.
Hope to See You Next Year,
Max