I’m a casual golf fan and a terrible golf player. Or golfer. Whatever you call it, my game is still measured by how many balls I lose instead of strokes. But every year, especially for the last few, I’ve carved out time on the Majors weekends to, at the very least, keep track of what’s going on, and as much as I can, watch.
I didn’t grow up playing golf – I picked it up 3 or 4 years ago – but I, like many, started paying attention when Tiger won his first Masters. I was 12, and didn’t care about golf. Happy Gilmore had come out the year before, and I distinctly remember the scene where Happy looks at another golfer and says “If I ever catch myself dressed like that, I’ll kick my own…” It’s a funny line, but it fit with my view of golf at that point. Stuffy old dudes who dressed funny playing a boring game. But Tiger was different. He was aggressive. He was young. People hated him, and that seemed to fuel him. And all of a sudden, golf was becoming cool. Whatever that nebulous term means, that’s what golf was becoming. Nike got into it bigtime. And over the years that developed more and more.
But I – again, like many – started to follow it as Tiger started to rack up wins. I don’t know specifics of which tournaments he won or didn’t, but he won a lot, and the patented red shirt and black pants became iconic. And he was, of course, controversial. He was consumed by success. He was an intimidating presence. He was an unassailable public figure, until seemingly instantly he wasn’t anymore. His failures were public. His humiliation headlined sports pages and gossip sites alike. The jokes wrote themselves. After all, there are few things we love more than watching a successful rich dude’s life fall apart. I mean, honestly, what’s more American at this point than reveling in the downfall of the guy at the top of his game, with the supermodel wife, every sponsorship possible, and seemingly everything going for him?
But Tiger, in the midst of all of that, showed me something about myself. Here’s a dude who had everything. The money, the wife, the talent, even the cool nickname. There aren’t many people in the world who are known by simply saying their nickname. Something about that is awesome and different than being known by one name. But I digress a bit. Behind Tiger was Eldrick. A dude who had everything and it still somehow wasn’t enough. I’d love to say that I had some major “a-ha!” moment while watching him, but really all I realized was that for the first time, I was seeing this superhero as a real person. And so he went from a dude who was a stone cold killer on day 4 of majors to a guy who was doing whatever he could to keep his life together.
I’ve always had a problem with people who say “I would never…” I’d like to think I would never do a lot of things, but the truth is, until you’re on top of the world with all of the money and success and fame and all of the trappings that go along with them, you don’t know what you would do. I wasn’t ever good enough at a sport to be a jerk about it. I’ve actually always thought one of the ways the Lord has been the most gracious to me was by not giving me a lot of natural athletic ability. My sneaking suspicion is had I been good at sports, you would have compared me to Marshall Henderson and been like “yeah, that Henderson guy is calm and collected compared to him.” But that’s not really the point – the point is that for me, and for many others, Tiger became human. The truth is that all of our lives are screwed up in some way or another. And it’s always a mixture. Sometimes it’s because of our honest mistakes, sometimes it’s because of our outright rebellion, and sometimes it’s because stuff happens to us that we have no control over one way or the other. It’s always a mixture because we live in a fallen world. But with Tiger we got a rare look at someone’s life falling apart at the peak.
And so something happened – in me, at least, and by judging Sunday’s reaction, in a lot of people – that Tiger went from a guy that was can’t miss TV to a guy we were actually pulling for. Before everything happened to him, he was like watching a great heel work in wrestling. And yes, I am maybe the one guy in America that gets as excited about Wrestlemania as I do about The Masters. The heel’s the bad guy, but he’s really good and you love to watch him work, and if/when he loses, it’s even better. That’s how I felt about Tiger. And maybe the professional wrestling analogy works on another level because after his fall from grace, Tiger became less of a character and more of a real person.
I don’t know the ins and outs of his life. It seems like he’s moved on and changed. His interactions with the media, fellow golfers, and fans seem less edgy and more real. He seems like an approachable guy now. Maybe he hasn’t, and this is all still great character work, but that’s not really for me to say. But his story is so powerful because it awakens the desire for redemption in all of us. We all want to know that there is hope beyond our worst moments. We all want to know that the pain, the tears, and the struggle will somehow be vindicated. We want to know that our most crushing defeats can be redeemed, and we want to know that our greatest successes are not ultimate in and of themselves, but point to something greater. I’m reminded of this, from The Brothers Karamazov:
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
Tiger resonates with me because Sunday was but a small taste of what Dostoevsky writes about. But tournament wins are fleeting. Green jackets fade, the power in the drive weakens, backs give out. What Tiger’s story awakens in all of us, I think, is the hope that some sort of lasting redemption awaits.
I didn’t realize it until this week, and maybe it took having a kid of my own to realize this, but for me, the lasting image from Tiger’s 1997 Masters win and the lasting image from his 2019 Masters win are similar. In ’97, it was Tiger and his dad hugging after he won. In ’19, it was Tiger embracing his kids. I’m convinced that all of us long, more than anything else, for our dads to hug us and proclaim loudly and boldly “you are mine. I am proud of you.”
Ultimately, this is what the cross promises us. This is what makes it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened – Our Father, saying to us that because of the work of Jesus on the cross, that we are His. And we rest in His promise that he is making all things – even the train wrecks of life that happen to us and that happen because of us – new.
The Ramblings of a Wayward Son 