There was a period not long ago when getting a tee time on our local golf courses was about as hard as getting an invitation to sleep over at the White House. Maybe harder. And the whole reason for it was one man, Tiger Woods. Woods inspired all sorts of people to grab some golf clubs and get out there and play, and I have no idea why, because there was no way on the face of the earth that anyone he inspired could even remotely play the way he did. And he certainly wasn't the first golfer to come along and do really well, and he wasn't the first African-American to break down a sport's racial barriers, but there was something about him, a charisma in addition to his abilities, that just made us want to be like him. We knew we couldn't be, but there was no sin in trying.
When Tiger's famous personal collapse came along, his game collapsed along with it. But that was a while ago, and if Michael Weinreb, writing for Grantland, is to be believed, nobody really cares much anymore (except maybe Tiger himself). The question is, will Tiger find his game again?
Two months after Tiger won his first Masters, I went to see him play at the Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio. I was doing what everyone else was doing at the time: I was there to write about how Tiger had changed the nature of golf, about how he might potentially change the nature of race relations in America... I subscribed to the mystique of Tiger because I was young, and he was of my generation, and I had never experienced a force of nature like him before. His youth and his background and his verve seemed intelligently designed to decontaminate a sport that clung hard to outdated tradition, and I imagined (naively, perhaps) that this would translate to the outside world as well.
This is a great essay about Tiger Woods and about golf and about aging and celebrity, and the timing of the Masters weekend makes this the perfect time to read it: The Aging Tiger Woods.
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