POOR old Tiger eh? It’s bad enough that he’s had to pull out of a variety of tournaments due to that fragile back of his but now his dodgy dorsal has meant he’s had to withdraw from attending a press conference too. At this excruciating, and increasingly concerning, rate, his creaking, crumbling frame must be so susceptible to twinges and tweaks it probably goes into spasm the moment he picks up a paper and reads about how gammy his gammy back is.
Woods was supposed to blether away to the media last night ahead of this week’s Genesis Open, a PGA Tour event which benefits his own Foundation, but the doctors dished out the orders and told him not to travel to the Riviera club in California. By all accounts, the 41-year-old is in a fairly dire state.
“He’s just having a hard time getting these spasms to calm down, he’s working on that on an hourly basis and he’s got personnel working with him to help pacify that,” said his manager, Mark Steinberg.
It’s a rather bleak picture and one which conjures up images of him shrouded in scaffolding while being gingerly manoeuvred around with the aid of an elaborate network of pulleys and guy ropes. Flippancy aside, Woods, in this worrying condition of pained, continued uncertainty, deserves to be pitied, not pilloried.
It was all so different 25 years ago. At this same Riviera course in Los Angeles, barely an hour from the Woods family home in Orange County, a teenage Tiger made his first PGA Tour appearance as a scrawny 16-year-old amateur. His injury-induced absence from proceedings this week merely adds a reflective layer of pathos to such a silver anniversary. Who knows if there will be a silver lining?
The event was known then as the Nissan Open but the tournament’s current name would have been far more appropriate. This was the Tiger Woods genesis, after all. A quarter-of-a-century on, the Woods CV has 79 PGA Tour titles, 14 major crowns and more records than a second hand vinyl sale. Forget that bloomin’ back for a moment; Woods was, quite simply, one of the world’s most supreme athletes.
In 1992, Tiger was the talk of the toon. And he had been for a while. He’d been on the TV with Bob Hope as a two-year-old, he’d won six Junior World Championship titles and, some six months before his appearance at Riviera, he’d won the US Junior Amateur Championship. Great expectations followed him around like a private detective.
Instead of being in his geometry class at Western High School, Woods stood on Riviera’s first tee for a golfing lesson that was probably more difficult to get the head round than mathematical chatter about the concepts of points, lines, planes, angles and curves. This, of course, would come in handy in later years when folk tried to fathom out Tiger’s new swing sequence.
“I teed the ball up and I was totally fine with my practice swings, no big deal,” Woods recalled on PGA Tour.com. “I get over the golf ball, no big deal. Look down the fairway, like ho-hum. It’s an easy tee shot from No. 1 at Riv. I take it back and the club felt like it weighed like eight tonnes. I didn’t know if I could get it to the top of my swing. I’d never felt the club that heavy. I was nervous, like I always am before an event, but I had never felt so awkward going back.”
The interest, the intrigue and the scrutiny would grow immeasurably. There would be no going back behind the curtain.
“It changed a lot, I was known more nationally now,” he said. “It was just an awareness of this new, young kid coming up; Tiger Woods. It was a very different world post-1992.”
The golfing landscape wouldn’t be the same again.
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