Tiger -- in addition to earning eight figures on the PGA Tour money list each year despite playing only the majors and when one of his sponsors, Buick, asks him, politely, to show up to its tournaments -- rakes in a pile of money each year by loaning his name to EA Sports. I don't have a problem with Tiger's video-game-self bombing it 350 yards down the middle every time, or an issue with Tiger Vision making every putt on the green a tap-in. What bothers me is that he appears to be playing that game on TV every weekend.
Nothing that man has devised in an attempt to make a golf course difficult appears to faze him. Things that should be challenging just aren't. On Sunday, standing on the tee of a 476-yard par-four monster, a hole that required a big drive and a solid second shot of most pros, Tiger hit three wood off the tee. Like a bulldozer, he rolled over the longest golf course to ever host a major.
On Sunday, Tiger flailed an approach shot right, clipped a couple tree branches, and ended up 55 yards short of the hole, in a bunker. Now, I play golf relatively seriously. Faced with a 55-yard trap shot, after dying a little bit on the inside and a couple of quick prayers, I would probably step into the trap and proceed to soil myself. If I hit a shot that flew in the general direction of the pin, I'd probably grin sheepishly, laugh a bit with my playing partners and tell a story about it after the round.
Tiger, however, didn't go with my plan of attack. He first glared at the ball, perhaps hoping to scare it onto the green. (The programmers at EA apparently have yet to add telekinesis to the game code.) After overcoming his frustration with his lack of total control of the laws of physics, he casually opened up the face of an eight iron and feathered his next shot inside twenty feet.
One would think that he would screw up eventually. He is, allegedly, a human being performing a relatively complex task. He seems to have missed the whole human-beings-are-fallible memo, however. He made the cut in every tournament he played in for seven straight years, finally missing one, by a single shot, in 2005.
Now, I can accept that someone is particularly talented in a given area. Generally, I'm better than him or her at something else. Tiger's lack of any discernible weakness is what really gets me.
Early in his career, he couldn't crack the top 140 on tour in bunker play, and the knowledge that even Tiger had a chink in his armor made me feel a bit better about myself. Then he conquered all things beach-related, winning over an unnaturally attractive Scandinavian bikini model for good measure.
Fortunate for my self esteem, there is usually little evidence that people eminently more athletic and good looking than I would also dummy me academically. So, for the sake of my ego, I assume that they can't add and feel better about myself. With Tiger? Two years at Stanford, no academic ineligibility, not a whisper of tutors writing papers for him. He's relatively tight-lipped, but when he does engage reporters, he's invariably articulate and occasionally funny.
So, to summarize, Tiger's currently drinking champagne out of the Wannamaker trophy on his private jet, flying someplace in Florida where he will take a couple weeks of vacation on his hundred foot yacht, occasionally taking breaks to pound Nike Platinums off the rear deck. Right now, I'm pecking away on a balky laptop keyboard in my poorly lit room trying to finish articulating Tiger's superiority over me in every aspect of life I can think of. If I'm lucky, I'll finish in time to go salvage some semblance of self respect with a pong win or two.
In case you were wondering, Tiger routinely runs the rec room ping pong table at the Tour.
