Golf world desperately praying for Tiger miracle in the magnolias

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2018 (2776 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Easter Sunday has come and gone, but the resurrection of Tiger Woods — and the moribund sport that he plays — is still to come this week, if you believe all the hype heading into this year’s Masters.

There hasn’t been this much excitement about golf since that memorable November night back in 2009 when Elin Nordegren used a five-iron to smash out the rear windows of her philandering husband’s Cadillac Escalade.

It was, in retrospect, the last decent swing a member of the Woods family would take for years to come.

Woods hasn’t won a major since the 2008 U.S. Open — 17 months before that night — hasn’t won a tournament of any kind since 2013 and at this point, his four major back surgeries now outnumber his three former porn-star mistresses. Which is just sad, on so many levels.

But golf needs Woods as desperately as Woods needs golf, and so even the tiniest flicker of life in his game the last couple months has the entire sport — and the legion of old white guys that are its last remaining audience — hyperventilating at the idea that Tiger and, therefore, golf generally, is finally back.

This premise is built on the flimsiest of foundations: While Tiger has as many impaired-driving arrests in the past year as he does top-three finishes — one — he’s at least been mostly finishing tournaments lately and not playing awful, both of which are new developments.

In five tournaments this year, Woods finished 23rd, missed the cut, finished 12th, finished tied for second and finished fifth. He currently sits 40th on this year’s PGA money list behind a long list of people you’ve never heard of: Ryan Armour, the guy one place ahead of Woods on the money list, has one win in his entire PGA Tour career.

If any other golfer had posted the same results as Woods in 2018 — and plenty have — you wouldn’t be hearing a word about him.

But because it’s Woods and because this week is the Masters — the one tournament that transcends golf and the one above all others that created the legend that is Woods — any sense of context or perspective has disappeared right alongside all common sense.

As of Monday morning, there was so much wishful-thinking betting on Woods that he was listed as either the odds-on favourite to win the Masters or the co-favourite, alongside Jordan Spieth, depending on which Vegas bookmaker you were checking.

That’s a joke, and I’m not the only one who thinks it is hilarious that a man who is currently listed at 202 on the PGA Tour in driving accuracy is going to win on a brutally difficult golf course where the margin for error every year is slim and none.

“I have not found one touring pro who thinks (Woods) is going to win Augusta,” Woods’ former coach Hank Haney said on his satellite radio show recently.

“Matter of fact, they think it’s a joke that he’s the favourite.”

It says something that the people who arguably have the most to gain financially from a Woods comeback, his fellow competitors, are privately laughing at him behind his back, and this time not just because of the train wreck that is his personal life.

By any measure you’d care to use — purse size, television ratings, corporate sponsorship, grassroots participation, course closures — golf has been in a death spiral ever since it emerged that its most marketable player has the all-too-common character flaw of being unable to keep his putter in his pants.

Consider the numbers:

In 1996, the last year Woods was still an amateur, the PGA Tour handed out $101 million in prize money. By 2008, the last year before we all learned — along with Nordegren — that in addition to being a world-class golfer Woods was also a world-class pig, the purses on the PGA Tour had nearly tripled, to $286 million.

Throw in all the corporate sponsors that came flooding into the sport with the attention that Woods’ heroics on the course brought to the game and one study estimates his presence on tour for those 11 glorious years was worth an extra $1.5 billion to Woods and his competition.

All of which is to say that the best thing that could happen to a guy like Phil Mickelson in Georgia this Sunday wouldn’t be slipping on a fourth green jacket; it’d be watching Woods don his fifth.

Ditto CBS and any other TV network that has seen ratings for golf fall off a cliff since the moment Nordegren picked up that five-iron.

Ditto the golf industrial complex that has seen sales of everything from clubs to balls to clothing go into the toilet along with Woods’ game. What does it tell you that Nike, once synonymous with Tiger, doesn’t even make golf clubs anymore?

Ditto the golf courses that are either closed or closing.

Ditto an entire generation of young people and visible minorities who decided golf was no longer cool the moment Tiger was no longer cool.

Consider some more numbers:

• Sixty-two per cent of the PGA’s TV audience is now over the age of 55, 87 per cent is white and just 12 per cent is under the age of 35. The audience for golf is dying, quite literally.
• In the sport’s biggest market, the U.S., 800 courses, or five per cent, have closed in the past decade.
• There are now fewer active golfers than at any time since Woods turned pro in 1997; and
• The number of golfers aged 18-30 has plummeted 35 per cent in just the past 10 years.

Golfers are dying — again, quite literally.

So if the people who play golf are disappearing and the people who watch golf are disappearing and the places to play golf are disappearing, what you are left with this week is an entire sport praying for a miracle and a saviour to rise again from the magnolias of Augusta.

Sadly for them, Easter is over. And so too, in all likelihood, is Tiger Woods.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek