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March 28th, 2024

Insight

Tiger Woods will ride along with Ryder Cup team

Ron Hart

By Ron Hart

Published Dec. 4, 2015

Tiger Woods, the long-suffering former golf phenomenon, has been named an assistant captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team by team captain Davis Love III. While the 39-year-old Woods has remained positive about his ability to return to form in 2016, his appointment to the nonplaying position sparks discussion as to whether the winner of 14 major golfing championships will ever compete again at a high level.

Woods, the No. 1 golfer in the world for years, is now ranked 384th. Woods recently ended his relationship with American skier Lindsey Vonn, who was originally drawn to him because she was impressed with how fast he could go downhill.

It’s been horrible. Tiger is playing so badly that he is down to one red Sunday shirt. He lost four balls in one round of golf and lost one of them was while he was putting. He spent more time in a bunker in 2015 than Adolf Hitler did in 1945. Harrison Ford’s plane has hit more fairways than Tiger has this year.

To be fair, Tiger has had some back problems, including a recently completed second surgery. Doctors think his back problems stem from not using his legs while picking up so many Perkins waitresses.

This dates back to when his wife, Elin, caught him with about 10 women. In her filing for divorce in 2010, she cited irreconcilable waitresses. His trouble began when he did not delete text messages from all the women he was seeing. Apparently, when he traveled, he liked to scare up something miscellaneous. He traveled a lot. His wife read the texts and went after him. Elin chased him down and hit his car with a nine iron. She felt an eight iron would be too much club. As he backed down the driveway to escape his wife, he hit a tree, and five more bimbos fell out.

He then tried to make amends by playing what many Americans fall for: the victim card. He said he had a “sex addiction,” so he sought treatment and raised awareness for this little-known condition, from which 10 out of 10 men suffer. Once he realized that tactic was not going to work (and Elin divorced him a year later) he went back to the Hattiesburg, Miss., sex clinic and had the procedure reversed.

As an aside, I really do not like to question science or get in the way of a doctor making a buck. But how does one lock 50 sexaholics in a Hattiesburg facility and not expect trouble? It’s like having an open bar at the Betty Ford Clinic.


We are a compassionate country. We believe in redemption, and I am pulling for Tiger. His offers a great life lesson for all of us. His biggest issue was that, on the way up, he was not nice to other players on the PGA Tour. When he fell from grace, no one was there to stick up for him. He built walls around himself and played the race card when things did not go well.

His profile is very similar to that of our president, who has always been treated differently from the rest of us. Tiger actually played golf with Obama this year. When asked how the president played, Tiger said, “Not bad for a guy who only plays six days a week.”

Tiger has been focusing on his charities – not Charity the stripper, but actual philanthropic endeavors. One would think he would team up with Bill Clinton to raise money for their shared nonprofit, The Boys Will Be Boys Club.

There is a redemptive element in time. Tiger has plenty of time to change the trajectory of his life and, thus, how history views him. Some talented racehorses have storied careers and then retire and are put out to stud. Tiger might have gotten that sequence in reverse order. But to be fair, we shouldn’t be too harsh in judging a celebrity for falling prey to temptations to which we mortals would never be subjected. The guy working the rack at Jiffy Lube is never tempted by a swimsuit model.

The PGA Tour needs Tiger; he has been good for the game. Television viewership is down when he is not in a tournament. Just as politics is more interesting to watch when Bill Clinton is involved, golf is more fun to watch when Tiger’s involved – for similar reasons.  

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