RICHARD, I totally agree with you that 5 months of it all does not make a clean slate...if a newbie with 5 months in the program was my sponsee, I would be staying in CLOSE touch to make sure she was getting there. Takes a while for the head to clear.
Golf IS what Tiger is good at and loves, so I applaud him for going back to it. In his off course life, however, he will be watched carefully...the media will look for any small thing to jump on and spin.
Here's an interesting article I found yesterday - one of Tiger's colleagues making some statements and giving another inside look at the pro golf life. He claims that Europeans don't make it at American golf because it is soo lonely a life - no camaraderie.
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http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/unbearable+heaviness+being+Tiger/2773475/story.html
The unbearable heaviness of being Tiger
Only one professional golfer dares to take a swing at the game’s weightiest topic
By Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun April 7, 2010
http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/2769127.bin
Tiger Woods of the U.S. looks at his iPhone before using it to take a picture of playing partner Mark O'Meara on the 10th green, during a practice round for the 2010 Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, April 6, 2010.
Photograph by: Hans Deryk, Reuters
If the ratings are to be believed, half of North America stopped what it was doing Monday to watch Tiger Woods answer questions on live television from the media room at the Augusta National Golf Club.
The other half, evidently, included all the players in the Masters field, who seem to have decided upon a common, harmless lie to fend off further queries about Tiger – namely: “Didn’t watch it. Sorry. So I can’t really say.”
And then there is Ireland’s Padraig Harrington, professional golf’s MVP – most voluble player – out of whose mouth so many pearls of wisdom spill each week, golf writers can just collect, collate, and regurgitate them, and presto! A column.
The words “no comment” are not in his vocabulary, bless his heart. So while practically all 94 other players not named Tiger Woods had little to add Tuesday – and hoped fervently not to be asked, ever again, about the scandal that has touched them all in one way or another – Harrington climbed down from the dais after his formal pre-tournament news conference, and happily fielded questions from a small knot of mostly European writers.
And waded right in to the unbearable heaviness of being Tiger.
It was a point of view few of Woods’s peers have dared to put forward, lest they appear to be sympathetic, which would take some explaining at home.
Harrington, winner of three majors in a span of 13 months – two of them, the 2008 British Open and PGA Championship, while Woods was rehabbing from knee surgery – had no such reservations.
His theory? Tiger Woods was driven to a secret life by the loneliness of his real one. Some of it self-imposed, some out of self-preservation.
“At the end of the day Tiger has always struggled to mix with the players purely because anywhere he goes people want things from him,” said Harrington, who has never been, especially, a friend of Tiger’s but sympathizes with the relentless demands on his time.
In the locker-room, he said, players always have something for Tiger to sign – his locker is frequently jammed with articles other players have put there to be autographed – so he tends to spend as little time as possible in what is supposed to be a sanctuary for the golfers.
“I think everyone has found that he was difficult to know. I would say over the years that Tiger Woods, other than in a rain delay, would use one out of 10 locker-rooms,” Harrington said.
Outside, the demands, and the dangers, are exponentially greater.
“I was playing in Houston last week and it was a reasonable week but it took me about 30 minutes each day signing autographs,” said Harrington. “If Tiger Woods did that it would take what? Five, six hours? You would have 20,000 people queuing up for that autograph.
“And he can’t stand there for half-an-hour and then walk away. You’re the worst in the world for turning down the next person in the line.
“That would be the same with the media and giving interviews to some but not others. There are just different levels all the way through and because Tiger is at a different level, he has to draw a line and stop.”
The temptation here is to roll our eyes and say, “Yeah, what an awful life, being adored everywhere.”
But Harrington is quite serious.
“Tiger just can’t walk into a restaurant and sit at the bar and have sushi,” he said, laughing. “It just can’t happen. He can’t just go out with his mates. That’s the good thing about the European Tour because you can wander down to the hotel foyer at 7 p.m. with no plans whatsoever but there would be three or four different groups of guys who you could go to dinner with.
“You’d meet the first guy you bump into and off you go. That does not happen much on the U.S. tour and happens even less for Tiger and that must be very frustrating.
“The reason the Europeans haven’t done that great in the States over the years is that life is very lonely for them. So in many ways Tiger is living his own life. There is no way I could sit in a hotel room in the evenings. That is no way to live your life, but in many ways he was forced into that lifestyle.
“Obviously, he found a social aspect in a different ...”
Ahem. Yes, obviously.
Even Harrington wasn’t about to open that can of worms.
Like the players, the tournament committee had hoped that by staging Tiger’s one and only pre-event press availability on Monday, conversation would turn to other things and a more or less normal Masters would unfold as the week progressed.
But Wednesday is predictions day, and guess who will be heavily featured? And then play begins Thursday, and Woods tees off in the next-to-last group of the day, with Matt Kuchar and K.J. Choi, at 1:42 p.m. EDT.
He should be playing the back nine during ESPN’s two-hour window from 4-6 p.m., barring a thunderstorm. Probably a coincidence.
But whether he flirts with missing the cut or challenges for the lead on the weekend, there will be nothing normal about this Masters. It will be all Tiger, all the time.
The fishbowl in which the, er, lonely Lothario lives has never been more transparent.
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