I have not written about Tiger Woods or golf for quite some time in my blog, largely because I know most people who read my blog are not interested in golf.  Tiger was certainly the reason I started playing golf – and that would not be a surprise for most people.  Even the players will tell you that they made much more money during the area when Tiger was at his greatest from 2003 to 2008.  TV audiences to this day go up 50% when Tiger is in contention.  

I was quite impressed with the very good interview with him on Time Magazine which you can read at time.com/tiger/ and where he points out a lot of people have been incorrect when they always believed that he has an obsession with Jack Niklaus’s record.  He says that he has always targeted what Jack Niklaus achieved at different ages and that that was the most important thing to him.  He says you cannot compare one era to another, but I believe that you can – and that the era of Jack Niklaus was certainly at a time when there was less competition than there was during Tiger’s era.  There are so many more athletic-type individuals who play golf now than there were in the good old cigar smoking, unfit golfers waddling around the golf course and Tiger changed all of that.  

He happens to have a higher winning percentage and better average scores in any event than any other major champion in golf.  The strange thing with him is that, perhaps because he has done so well, earned so much money and being so spectacularly successful, there have always been a huge number of Tiger haters out there who will find any reason to criticise him.  The problems he had with his wife were one of those reasons and whereas typically the average man could not care less as to who a sport star is sleeping with or is not, it became a major issue in his case.  Who really cares every time we read about some famous English soccer player being named by a few more prostitutes that he slept with?  It never matters and nobody ever says that that soccer player is any worse for it, but when it came to Tiger Woods, it suddenly became the major reason.  Interestingly enough, in the interview he says that the modern players, the one who asks him the most questions and speaks to him the most is Jason Day, a player who, when he is hot, simply cannot be beaten.  I think the interview is very interesting for anybody who has ever followed golf or Tiger Woods, and it shows a different side to Tiger Woods than anybody has ever seen and deals with the fact that he is more interested in keeping his back in a good condition so that he can play with his children than he is worrying about golf.  The Tiger haters will no doubt find things in the interview to criticise him for, the first of which will probably be to say that he has changed what they believed his target has always been in terms of Jack Niklaus’s 18 majors.  At the end of the day, it was his bedroom wall where he wrote his targets, and the haters can say what they want, but only he can say what his targets were and like everybody in the world, he is entitled, if those are no longer his targets in life, to change his targets.  

The funniest thing, when you talk to the Tiger haters, is that they are never aware of what he said in any of his interviews and they have very little regard for anything he says – unless they believe it is controversial, and they can nail him for it – because they are not interested in hearing anything or reading anything that does not fit their perception of him – and I suppose it is true of many people in respect of many other people and issues.