People nowadays are just as quick to jump off the bandwagon as they are to jump on. It was only a few years ago that Eldrick “Tiger” Woods was thoroughly dominating the world of golf. Every tournament he entered drew enormous numbers of spectators, not to see close competition, but to see by how much Tiger would roll over the rest of the field.
Tiger is the face of golf. When you mention football, people respond with names like Peyton Manning, Terrell Owens and Priest Holmes. When you think of basketball, players like Tracy McGrady, Kevin Garnett, and Allen Iverson come to mind. But when you think of golf, the first and last name that anyone mentions is Tiger Woods. That sort of notoriety and pressure makes Tiger seem superhuman, and anything less than domination becomes failure.
After having a 264-week stranglehold on the number one ranking in the world, pressure continued to mount, coming from both himself and the media. People expected him not just to win, but to win big. And when someone finally came along and knocked Tiger off his perch, the fans started to talk of a slump.
A slump is Barry Bonds failing to hit more than 30 home runs while on the juice, or Randy Moss not getting fined at least twice in a season. Tiger Woods failing to win a stroke-play match on the PGA Tour in 2004 is not. Sure, 2004 wasn’t Tiger’s best year, but it was not a lost cause by any stretch of the imagination. Woods finished in the top 10 in 16 out of the 22 events he entered and solidly remained number two in the world behind the hot Vijay Singh.
Woods just couldn’t find a way to sign the winner’s scorecard. He plugged along, finishing second in four events, but never came out on top. Let’s not forget that this is a man who held every single major title in the world no more than four years ago. He has won the Masters by 12 strokes and demolished U.S. Open competition by 15 strokes. He has 58 career tour victories, including eight majors, and is golf’s number one career money leader, holding a $9 million edge over Singh.
People blamed the loss of his swing coach, or his pending marriage to Jesper Parnevik’s former nanny for Tiger’s woes. But very few people stopped to think that Woods might not be having any troubles. He was playing solid golf and remaining competitive; he just wasn’t able to blow away the competition as he had in the past. Even the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus, went on an 0 for 12 stretch in majors when he turned 27. The greats have problems too.
This past week, Tiger finally got back to his winning ways at the Buick Invitational in La Jolla, CA. Playing with the flu and battling the fog, Woods came from behind and gave the golf world what it expected: a Tiger Woods victory. With a three shot win over Charles Howell III, Woods won his first stroke-play event since the 2003 American Express Championships and had people hailing his return to form. But what is being overlooked by this momentous occasion is that Tiger Woods isn’t returning. He never left.
