Augusta National. The Masters. Tiger Woods

Tiger was spotted earlier in the week walking 18 holes at Augusta National golf course with his caddy.This isn’t necessarily breaking news, I had read it in multiple news outlets, from Twitter to The New York Post. It’s left a lot of people asking the question “will Tiger be teeing it up in the Masters next week?” This would be an amazing come back after the horrible accident in February 2021 in Los Angeles. It’s been a very painful road to recovery, through surgeries and physical therapy, and there aren’t many people who would be able to rebound that quickly from those types of injuries. Augusta is a very hilly and demanding course and tough even for the healthy, but Tiger isn’t one of us. He’s a mutant. An animal. A genetic anomaly. The ultimate competitor, who’s biggest rival is himself. He has proved time and again that he will go down as one of the greatest athletes of all time. And most certainly the greatest golfer. I don’t want to take anything away from the greats, like Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, Jack Niklaus, Ben Hogan, Gene Sarazen to name just a few, but I think that golf just like everything else has not only grown in popularity, but has evolved into something greater than it’s parts. It’s more accessible to a larger audience, and therefore there is more competition now than there was even 20-30 years ago. I feel as though it’s much more competitive, and harder to rise to the top of a wave of athletes who are on the verge of greatness. This is not unlike any other sport. You really can’t compare an athlete at the top of his/her game in 2022 to an athlete who was at the top of his game in 1960 (a totally arbitrary year that I just threw out there). It’s one thing to say that he is one of the greatest golfers of all time, and it’s quite another when you view it through the lens of what that means in 2022. It would be easy for him to shuffle off into the sunset, and let his legacy live forever. But he’s not that guy. As long as he is physically able to play, he’s going to play. So, yea. I think we’ll be seeing him at the 2022 Masters, and it’s going to be awesome.