Lost in every sense of the word, golf and golf alone can now save Tiger Woods from himself. Golf is what God seemed to have made him for. That’s what he was good at. Change that: that’s what he was great at.
Woods, even at his best, never belonged to anyone. His father, Earl, may have helped make some parts of what we got to see on the golf course. His father was probably the only person he was ever ‘close’ to.
By the time he lost his father, Tiger Woods had won 10 Majors; he would win four more. But now when you put that entire thing in retrospect and revisit 3 May 2006, the day Earl Woods breathed his last, you get the feeling that a part of Tiger Woods, too, died with him that day.
It did not show for some time. Or, maybe it did but we did not recognise it. In his first Major (2006 US Open) after his father’s death, Woods missed the cut for the first time at a Major in his professional career. But then he summoned strength and courage and raised his game to a level resembling 2000-01 (when he four Majors in a row and three in 2000 alone). Over the next eight Majors – from 2006 Open to the 2008 US Open, he won four times and finished second three times! Then, the wheels, slowly but steadily, kept coming off.