What Goes Around

I am a member of a golf thread on a message board.

One of my friends wrote that he felt he was in a dream yesterday.

My reply below:

It was surreal, particularly when you factor:

1. A fantastic leaderboard, with most of the greatest players in the game having a chance., and the kaleidoscope effect of turning the dial to see which one of those players might prevail. It was a large list after Molinari’s Miscue on 12.

2. Sunday at The Masters always, ALWAYS, amps the pressure, which becomes a tangible force ... a lurking, hovering menace that might strike anywhere and anyone at any time.

3. Add the threatening weather, with its capricious gusts, followed, at times, by driving rain, and the uncertainty of when the worst of the weather would strike. One might say that that was overkill in the manufacturing of suspense.

When you care about the outcome of an event, you are an easy target for that suspense. Very easy.

There are people on this thread I know only because of this thread, and how far back we go sharing the hope since 2008 that Sunday would happen again.

I’m guilty of many tedious offerings on this thread (this is another) of what Tiger Woods means to a game I love. I get it that some don’t share my point of view, and at one time, it was a lot more than some that despised Tiger.

There are some who cling to the premise they can like Tiger the golfer, not the person. And they maintained that point of view instead of peering through a more current lens that revealed a man battling his worst enemy — himself — IN PUBLIC — and somehow managed to rise above the worst of himself: his arrogance.

The scandal and the injuries, however, stripped that arrogance away, and slowly, in plain view, Tiger Woods rebuilt his swing and began the long, tedious process of regaining confidence, while also shifting as a person. One could not happen without the other.

If you can’t see that dynamic, and you have no respect for what it entailed, I’m not sure I can help you. I wish I could because you are not grasping the magnitude of what has just happened.

Some will say TIGER DID THIS. TIGER DID THAT. HE’S A JERK. HES A BLAH-BLAH-BLAH.

All opinions are valid, no matter how obtuse or restrictive.

As Dylan said, “I’m not here to argue or judge.” But allow me to suggest that everyone deserves a second chance. Golf even has a special word for it. Mulligan. 

Imagine, though, commentators doing Featured Groups at The Masters …. “I don’t know, Billy, he hasn’t taken his mulligan yet.” As if a mulligan were a Marvel superpower that the hero would employ when the situation warranted.

But that’s in a comic book — a mulligan is an amateur’s denial of reality, a tool in his bag next to his best weapon, which Chi Chi said was his pencil.

The pros don’t have that option. Life and golf are not fair. When you play the ball down in either, there will be adversity. Everyone makes massive blunders, and sometimes, they get away with it. Sometimes they don’t.

Karma casts a large net. It’s also patient.

One could say that karma had a strong hand in creating the mental and physical struggles Woods endured, just as much as it engendered the reward at the end of that long, tedious process of recovery.

Karma, not Patrick Reed, put that jacket on Tiger yesterday.