On The Masters

I never really felt comfortable at the Masters. I covered it several times back in the late 1990s, back when mid-sized newspapers still had the budget and the inclination to send their writers to major sporting events, and it always felt like I was wandering into a '50s theme park, a conflation of blooming flowers and aging white men and especially low-priced pimento cheese sandwiches. There is a high wall that separates Augusta National from Augusta itself, and on the other side of Washington Road there are chain restaurants and car dealerships and waitresses like the one I spoke to at the Waffle House one year, who had never been beyond the wall and imagined Augusta National as a naturalistic utopia just beyond her reach.

Now I understand that Augusta National is a private club, and so, at some level, if they prefer to only permit members with cleft chins, they are protected by the law.* But there has to be a balance here, because Augusta hosts one of the three most prestigious golf tournaments in the world, because they are essentially one of the faces of professional golf. And they seem to think that it is enough if they present a beautiful visage for television, if they charge modest prices for tickets and for parking and for souvenirs and for pimento-cheese sandwiches. It's as if, because they roll back their profit margin to the 1950s, their anachronistic exclusivity should be faulted--as if two-dollar sandwiches excuse an utter lack of female members, which leads to incidents like the one that occurred yesterday, when Bergen Record reporter Tara Sullivan, attempting to do an interview, was denied entrance to the clubhouse.***

And maybe Augusta National is telling the truth when they say that Sullivan's barring was a mistake. Maybe it was an honest misunderstanding, but these misunderstandings don't take place in more enlightened atmospheres****. These misunderstandings occur because Augusta National still clings to an outdated mentality that is no longer socially acceptable outside the gates.

Here's an uncomfortable thought: It's been almost 15 years since Tiger Woods won his first Masters, and there were no African-American golfers other than Woods near the top of the leaderboard yesterday. It's been eight years since Martha Burk's protest, and Augusta National (as far as we know) still doesn't have any female members. All those years ago, when I covered the Masters, we presumed that Tiger would influence an entire generation of minority (and even female) youth, that Tiger's mere presence would change golf itself. But I have to imagine it is still daunting for certain young golfers to make their way in a world that is largely upper-class and overwhelmingly white, in a game where the keepers of its most prestigious tract of land refuse to acknowledge that the world has changed.

*Honestly, I have no idea if that's true. I did not attend law school, and I do not have a cleft chin.**
**Not that there's anything wrong with that.
***And if you think women should not be permitted equal access to open locker rooms, please note that it is the law. You either open your locker room for everyone or for no one, and anything else is blatant discrimination.
****And that is the first and last time I will refer to a baseball clubhouse as "enlightened."

On Tiger (and Joe)

Let me state the obvious first: Joe Posnanski is an outstanding writer, and one of the nicest people I've met in this business, and I would say I agree with him at least 87 percent of the time. But yesterday Posnanski wrote a curious piece about Tiger Woods--headline "Writing Off Tiger"--and for once, I find his logic specious. His point was essentially that Tiger thrives on being overestimated rather than underestimated...that he wins by intimidation...that he's nearly 35 years old and most golfers that age are on the downside of their careers. "The difference between good and great is a whisper," Joe writes.

It's true...something is missing from Tiger's game at this very moment, but this argument also presumes that Tiger can never recover, that the aura of invincibility that defined his career has been irrevocably spoiled. It's an argument based on the presumption that Tiger Woods is now nothing more than a very good golfer, that he fits within the statistical norm, that his career from here on out will match the arc of, say, Mark O'Meara or Vijay Singh or Padraig Harrington.

Here's what we know: Tiger needs to win four more major championships to match Jack Nicklaus' majors win total of eighteen. Joe writes that Jack Nicklaus won four major championships after the age of 35, but this is deceptive, since Nicklaus also won two majors at the age of 35, meaning that, if Tiger follows Jack's precise path from here on out, he'll wind up with twenty major championships.

So, just to reiterate: Tiger Woods has already won fourteen major championships. He's already 75 percent of the way to his goal. Even if he's not the player he once was, even if his skills are diminishing, he is still the greatest golfer of his generation. He still scares you. Most people, including his fellow tour players, will likely overestimate him for the rest of his career, even if he never wins another tournament. When Michael Jordan was playing in Washington, his body and his reputation crumbling around him, there was a sense that he could channel his former self at any moment, that on a given night, tongue wagging and shorts sagging, he could pour in fifty. Personally, I think Tiger Woods is nowhere near the Jordan-in-D.C. stage; I think he's in the Jordan-Playing-Minor-League-Baseball Stage. His downfall is largely mental. It may take him another year or two to regain his cerebral equilibrium, but I'll be shocked if he doesn't regain his physical form at some point. And once he wins a single major, than the Overestimation Factor falls right back in his favor, and he could easily win several more in succession.

Here's the other thing: Tiger is only the second great golfer in history (beside Gary Player) who actually resembles an athlete. He's strong, and he's conditioned--if anything, maybe he's been a little too conditioned the past few years--and that should buy him several additional productive seasons. As Joe points out, only two golfers spread out their championships over an exceptionally long period of time: One is Nicklaus, and there is little doubt that Tiger is in Nicklaus's class, in terms of ability. The other is Player, and Tiger is in Player's class, in terms of conditioning.

It's true, what Joe says: Tiger Woods is not a movie, and he's not a fairy tale. But he is the greatest golfer of his generation. He elevated a game into a sport. He is, we now know, a deeply flawed individual, and a perception of weakness can be a difficult hurdle to overcome when your career thrives on an aura of invincibility. But the fact that Tiger built that aura in the first place was the most miraculous sports story of the modern age. To presume that he can't build it again is to ignore that a whisper can pass in both directions.

(Photo: Alastair Grant/AP)

On The Imminent Return of the World's Best Golfer

OK, so here's a trivia question: Who was the winner of the 1996 PGA Championship? And here's a hint: You do not know the answer.

Here's another hint: He's the man in this picture, and you still do not know the answer.

The only reason I know the answer is because the 1996 PGA Championship was the first major golf tournament I ever covered as a journalist. It was held in Louisville, and it was won by Mark Brooks, who defeated Kenny Perry in a playoff. Mark Brooks, of course, was champion of the 1979 Trans-Mississippi Amateur, the 1991 Greater Milwaukee Open, and 1991 KMart Greater Greensboro Open. And let me tell you, Mark Brooks was a font of charisma like none I had ever seen. In fact, Mark Brooks, upon winning the 1996 PGA Championship, upon reaching this life-changing watershed moment in his existence, popped open a can of diet soda and uttered these immortal words: "I don't know what you want me to do."

This was golf before Tiger Woods. (A few years later, I wrote a story about a pro named Jeff Maggert, who was once mistaken for Mark Brooks by a waitress.) I covered the game for about four years, both pre-Tiger and post-Tiger, and I cannot emphasize enough the impact Tiger had not just on golf, but on the perception of the PGA Tour. Pre-Tiger, professional golf was the dominion of decent humans with little to no interest in anything outside the trajectory of a 7-iron. The game was insular, the writers who covered the game were often insular--I sometimes sat next to a longtime golf writer from a rival market, who never engaged in a single conversation with me, presumably because I did not dress like a golfer myself--and everyone seemed happy to let it lie that way.

Then came Tiger, who managed to radiate charisma while saying nothing interesting, and I found myself writing idiotic stories with leads like "Golf is cool."* Then came Tiger, and for a time, you could feel the divide, the resentment among the those who felt their sport was being infringed upon by casual fans who did not feign interest in the trajectory of a 7-iron. And I will readily admit that I am one of those casual fans: The only time I tune in to a golf tournament is on a Sunday afternoon, four times a year, if Tiger Woods is within five shots of the lead.

I have no idea what professional golf is like now--the general lack of diversity, more than a decade after Tiger's ascendance, still shocks me a little--but I get the feeling that Tiger came on tour as an isolated entity, and nothing ever really changed. He was the golfer who represented all of us who didn't really like golf. His friends on Tour were his friends on Tour, but even they existed outside the bubble--at least, that's what this Mark Calcavecchia quote leads me to believe. It makes me think that most professional golfers never really accepted the Tiger Woods phenomenon, even as the Tiger Woods phenomenon (powered by Nike, Inc.) purposely set itself apart from the rest of the game. And I'm not going to get into the Ali comparisons,** but I'm not sure if many of those people who tiptoed around him all these years, who felt that he had shattered their serene little world in the first place, are going to be eager to welcome him back, especially with Ringling Brothers in tow. Which could make it far more difficult for him to do what he once did, but might also provide him with the only motivation he really needs to completely alter the game of golf for the second time in his life.

*This is an actual lead, written by me, a professional journalist. Sometimes I hate myself.
**I can see both sides here, though mostly I just appreciate Bill Simmons' speed chess metaphor. In fact, I wish he wrote about chess more often.

On the New Tiger

You may not even remember this, but a year ago, as Tiger Woods was on his way to winning the U.S. Open on a bum knee, a small segment of crazies came to believe that Tiger Woods may have, in fact, been faking his knee injury in the name of gamesmanship. It was a pretty daffy conspiracy theory, even as conspiracy theories go, and it was quickly debunked, but in the wake of that came this column for ESPN.com, in which the author marveled at Tiger's ability to camouflage whoever and whatever he was as some sort of protective mechanism. That column--not my best work, I admit--was something of a provocation, and the array of troglodytic comments underneath the story reveal that it succeeded on some level: People were both defensive of Tiger's right to privacy and reactionary toward any sort of scrutiny that delved beyond surface-level. They seemed to like Tiger Woods more because they knew nothing about him, because his entire life (outside of the practice of the most staid sport imaginable) seemed undramatic, because he was a cyborg with a 3-wood. They didn't want to know more than that. They (and I) didn't think they would ever have to.

Well, now they have no choice. Now, everything Tiger Woods carefully constructed in the past decade--and I would argue, a media strategy that has been built up in the past two decades, ever since Michael Jordan settled into a Nike-constructed cocoon*--has been torn down in a single morning. Now, we are likely to learn far more about Tiger Woods than we would ever care to know. This is the way of the modern scandal, and it always seemed as if Tiger were above such things, as if he simply existed in his own private space, free to chase Nicklaus's record of 18 major championships while every detail of his public life would forever be programmed by a roomful of MBAs. But now, suddenly, his private life is fodder for TMZ--and you can argue that Tiger doesn't owe us anything, and you can argue that this is an unwarranted intrusion into his private life, and you can argue that you preferred Tiger as a blank canvas--as a robotic manifestation of perfection***--and you may be right about all of it. But you also cannot deny that there is something undeniably fascinating--not to mention undeniably human--about watching an athlete who seemed determined to script his entire existence suddenly have to deal with an ad-lib.

*I write a little bit about the construction of athletes' public personas in Bigger Than the Game (AFPO!),** and spoke to Bo Jackson about it when I interviewed him. It's kind of amazing how the forces of sports marketing evolved from a non-entity into the Construction of Tiger. 

**Available for Pre-Order!

***In a word replete with needlessly dull information, Tiger's website is kind of a brilliant manifestation of nothingness. Did you know that Tiger's favorite movie is Caddyshack?  His blog is like one of those mass Christmas letters from the most boring uncle you could imagine--in "Tiger's" hands, a meeting with the president is boiled down to two non-committal paragraphs that appear to have been written by a public relations intern and sanitized by a Congressional committee ("I also enjoyed talking with the secret-service agents"). In "Tiger's world," choosing sides in the NBA Championship is an agonizing task. The whole site is structured like a Zen koan.

On Golf, Beer Bellies and the Definition of Sport

A few years ago, I wrote a book about chess. It was, by all accounts, a curious decision, one I couldn't fully explain even now, except to say that I found what I thought was an excellent story, and I wanted to share it with the world (and in an ideal world, the process of finding an idea would be just that simple, every time around). And in the process of promoting said book, I was surprised how often I was asked a question that seemed, at least to me, entirely irrelevant--the question of whether chess, in any way, shape or form, could somehow be considered a "sport."

I suppose most rational humans would agree that the answer is pretty obviously negatory, though I also rationalized my answer by noting that golf is considered a sport, and is reported about on the sports pages (including by me, for several years), when, in fact, golf is not really a sport at all. I still believe this, and apparently I am not the only one: Tom Watson's near-miss at the British Open, at age 59, has motivated skeptics like CBS Sports' Mike Freeman to make the same point. And yet I find myself somehow disagreeing with Freeman even as I fundamentally agree with him.

I have nothing against Freeman; I once shared the microphone with him at a book reading, and I find him an entertaining and provocative columnist. But he seems determined to denigrate golf by repeatedly likening it to bowling, as if bowling is somehow the bane of the Western world, as if somehow men with beer guts are incapable of feats of athleticism (which would most likely elimate every relief pitcher before 1982, as well as several backup quarterbacks). At one point, I believe he becomes the first sports columnist since Westbrook Pegler to use the word "casuistry," and it is all very interesting, except whenever I read something like this--a pointed argument assaulting our liberal definition of the word "sport"--I find myself asking a simple question:

Who cares?

Perhaps I am the exception to the rule here. Perhaps there is some validity to Freeman's argument that golf, given its long history of haughtiness and racial separatism, deserves to be taken down a peg. But while it is true that there are certain "sports" I would prefer to watch, and while a case can be made that certain sports may seem less relevant as the nation evolves around them, I also think there is simple truth to sportswriting, and to journalism in general, which is that a good story is a good story, no matter what dubious form it may take. And Tom Watson at the British Open was a good story (as Freeman eventually acknowledges), and Roger Federer at Wimbledon was a good story, and LeBron James in the NBA playoffs was a good story, and Bobby Fischer in '72 was a good story, and Earl Anthony when...he was, like, Earl Anthony...was a good story, and all of these men were incredibly skilled--perhaps even geniuses--at their given avocations, be they "sports" or "specialized skill sets."

I mean, let's face it: In an ideal world, we would spend our time analyzing rivalries between neurologists and cell biologists and algebra teachers, and we would value all of these avocations more than the ability to hack at a ball with a stick. That is not how the world works, but until it is, I see no reason not to extend the notion of public genius as far as it will go.

(Photo: AP/Alastair Grant)