The Common Golfer

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m actually going to stand up for Tiger Woods.  I don’t consider myself to be a “Tiger apologist,” but there are a few articles out there calling Tiger a poor sport for his comments at the end of The Barclays at Liberty National Golf Course – and those articles are wrong.

He had a six-foot putt on the 72nd hole to force a playoff and have a chance to win The Barclays, but like a lot of his putts last week, he missed.  ”If I would have hit a poor putt, I would have been (angry),” Woods said later, “but I didn’t.  Not too many golf courses that you misread putts that badly.  This course is one.”

Thank you to Steve Politi at NJ.com for the quotes, but I feel his article is way off, saying that He sounded like a shortstop blaming the infield grass for an E-6 or a goalie blaming the Zamboni for a bad goal. This was denial, plain and simple, and it was coming from the most unlikely athlete. And adding that Tiger is forgetting the simplest truth about golf: Everyone in the field plays the same course. And everyone else — or at least the ones on the leaderboard — seemed to handle the greens just fine.

What seems to get forgotten, is that Heath Slocum and Steve Stricker both missed putts around 7 feet on the 17th hole.  Now obviously, I have no way of knowing it they were misreads or good putts on a bad green…but neither does anyone else who wasn’t out there with a putter in their hands.  And just because Slocum made a longer putt, on the same line as Tiger’s putt, doesn’t necessarily mean that Slocum had better control over his putting.  Even on a horrible green, people are going to make some putts.

All I am saying is that Tiger doesn’t complain about golf courses very often (I’m actually having a hard time recalling any time other than last week), so maybe he actually is right.  You can argue about whether or not it’s appropriate for him to be publicly making the comments he did…but if the greatest golfer ever tells me that the greens at Liberty National are easy to misread, then I’m going to believe him!  If one of the greatest putters in golf tells me that he hit a great putt on 18, then who am I to tell him otherwise?

People will point out that Tiger missed some short putts earlier in the round, and even had a three-putt.  But the difference is that Tiger probably won’t tell you he hit a good putt in those instances.  I think everyone is quick to lump Tiger in with all the other prima dona athletes who blame their failures on someone or something other than themselves.  But he doesn’t have  a track record of behaving that way, so why start now?

I’m interested to know what you think.  Please comment!