Tiger Woods’ toughest opponent is Tiger Woods himself

We’re all rooting for Tiger Woods here, trying to get him to bring his life, physical and mental, to a better place. If this was Tiger vs. Phil or Sergio or Chris DiMarco, you might have a different root interest. itof course, it is not. Tiger became Tiger by often, though not always, beating Phil & Co. This was entertainment, this was sport, this was drive and execution like most had never seen before. This is different. This is Tiger against himself. Tiger facing the pain of life.

Woods is a 50-year-old athletic icon — a true icon in an era of anything. He has two children with his ex-wife, who also has three more children with her current partner. Tiger has a girlfriend with her five children. The girlfriend has a former father-in-law who is also the most powerful person in the world and the man who gave Woods his highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, after he won Masters 2019. Woods won 14 Grand Slams in a 12-year span. Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas and a host of others grew up in the ten-year wait between No. 14 and No. 15, the 2019 Masters.

Twenty-two months after that victory Woods ran off the side of a deserted Los Angeles County road early on a weekday morning, into a tree and near death. Don’t call it an accident – that would be an insult to the many people who did everything in their power to save his life. Don’t say that winning takes care of everything. The marketing people at Nike, who came up with that phrase after a Woods scandal back in the day, were, after all, just trying to move the product.

The great tragedy of modern life is that everything has turned into a product. Golf is one productfor PGA Tour brass. Journalism is one product. Clicks are monetized. It is deadly. Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus and Watson were the dominant players and unique personalities that captured our imagination. But they were not products. Tiger Woods has been packaged and sold since he was 3 years old. Woods knows his state of mind that morning in February 2021, when he was pulled from another wrecked car. A cry for help is a terrible cliché, but that crash should have been a cry for help. In the end, not too loud. His crash last weeka mile or so from his home in South Florida can be noisier.

This time, his hand was forced, as it was after his 2017 DUI arrest by police in Jupiter, Fla. In golf’s diverse and closed circles — on the Golf Channel, on websites and in newspapers, in an announcement from the CEO of the PGA Tour — Woods’ statement on Monday was met with relief and admiration. He said he was “stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on my health.” You hope, of course, that he can get the treatment that, by his own admission, he needs. But there is more going on here.

While this second DUI charge in Florida is dismissed the path of jurisprudenceprosecutors would require Woods to seek treatment. Woods is trying to avoid a prison sentence here, of any length. He is trying to avoid the spectacle of a public trial. There is nothing to fight here. There are advocates and counselors deep in his life. Signing up for treatment, on a voluntary basis, was a smart and necessary first step in an effort to keep a bad situation from getting worse.

Woods has been on the road to treatment before. In early 2010, weeks after running a fire hydrant in the middle of the night outside his home in the Isleworth development near Orlando, Woods reportedly checked into a residential treatment facility in Mississippi to deal with addiction issues. His 2017 prayer also sought counseling. A statement is a statement. Last year, when Woods took to X to announce his engagement to Vanessa Trump, he wrote: “Love is in the air and life is better with you by my side!” Please enter the surrounding air quotes has written Sound like Tiger Woods to you? Monday’s sober announcement has an entirely different tone, of course. We don’t know anything about Tiger’s state of mind, and he doesn’t owe us that – or really anything.

What he owes us is what every driver in the world owes every other driver, pedestrian, bicyclist and stray animal in the world, and that is alert, uncompromising driving. After his crash on Monday, Woods can be seen in photos on the side of the road, golf shirt tucked neatly into shorts, glasses on, cell phone to ear. In those grainy photos, he looks like what he’s been for, well, many years now, the iconic golfer on another comeback trail. Pictures can mislead you just like statements can mislead you.

The tiger has pain and sleep problems. He has admitted this many times. As a sportsman, his glory days are long behind him. He knows that, of course. He likes to say, “Father Time is invincible.” People take painkillers because they are in pain. People drive while impaired because of a level of arrogance, along with self-absorption. People go into recovery to find some kind of way forward. Sometimes it works. Because we love golf, because we admire what Woods did as a golfer, Tiger’s issues are getting attention here. In every other respect, he’s just another guy trying to figure it out. Except he has to do it with the whole world watching.

We don’t know who Tiger Woods was talking to on his cellphone when he was on the side of the road Friday afternoon. The single most impressive thing he could have done that day is to apologize to the person driving the truck pulling the pressure washer. Fortunately, the driver was not injured. But his day was also turned upside down.