Tiger

As I write this, Tiger Woods is playing the final round of the Tour Championship with a five-stroke lead after his first seven holes.  Win or lose, what he has accomplished to return to the very top tier of the PGA is almost unimaginable.

Tiger Woods has had a rough time for about ten years.  Just over ten years ago, Jill and I stayed home on the Monday after Father's Day to watch a remarkable 18-hole playoff that ended a remarkable US Open the way we thought it should, with a Tiger Woods victory.  We had no idea that we would not see another major victory from him.  Yet.

He apparently spent some of the intervening time trying - for reasons only known to him - to become a Navy Seal.  I highly recommend this article about that period of Tiger's life.  The kind of training he did for that guided his body and his strength away from what he needed to play top-level golf.  It's not clear that this bothered him at the time.

Just the fact of this much comeback from where he's been is remarkable.  Which makes the churlishness of the NBC commentators all the more stomach-churning.  The left-handed compliments and the outright insults they speak into open mics about Tiger is just nauseous.  Would they do this to a white golfer in a similar situation?