Tiger is no saint but that is okay, too!

But here is one thing; Tiger Woods’ fifth Green Jacket win doesn’t have to be about him getting even or rising from the ashes of his scandalous past.

I am the sporty type. My old bones will not allow me to compete anymore, but television has become a convenient alternative allowing me to live and marvel at the excellence of Lionel Messi dinking the ball over a hapless goal keeper or Eliud Kipchoge striding through the streets of Berlin at the speed of a cyclist.

Yet I don’t see athletes as heroes. I don’t look at them and think they should be the ones my children look up to for examples about grit and hard work. That is why I have a hard time understanding why people are so judgmental of Tiger Woods. I neither applaud nor care about all the things he has or hasn’t done.

That is for him to deal with and just because he is exceptional at directing a small ball over hundreds of yards and into a little cup shouldn’t make him a shining example of morality.

Neither by the way should it make him a human target for all of our verdicts and rebukes.
But so targeted for ridicule was when he was in trouble that it makes his performance last Sunday feel like a personal refurbishment story if am being modest, or the thrusting of two fingers at us, if am to be brutally honest.
It was one of those games one remains forever inconsolable for missing and such was my fate.

I had stayed up till 2am the night before though, to watch him ominously move within a shot’s lead.
Even then his entire demeanor was oozing inevitability. The crowd sensed it. So did the people in the commentary boxes, his opponents and I suspect, the King himself.

And he didn’t disappoint. Here was a man standing on top of a compost heap of the self-doubt he harboured about getting back to the top of his game after a succession of domestic scandals, injuries, surgeries and an addiction to painkillers that threatened to end his life one way or the other.

And what is there not to love about a good comeback story?
Once again, he was our hero - a liberator of the black race, a genius, the greatest golfer to walk the greens of this planet. But we have done it before, haven’t we?

Built pedestals for our heroes before our judge-jury-executioner instincts take and knock them over.
But here is one thing; That fifth green jacket doesn’t have to be about him getting even or rising from the ashes of his scandalous past.

It should be about him demonstrating the grit and hard work necessary to earn a second chance. And I hope he goes on to win every major between now and 2025! But if he doesn’t, that’s okay, too.

Just being able to make that comeback is deserving of his talent and enough for me, seeing I have never held him up to any standards apart from pretending to be him on days when I dust my clubs and make my own incessant and rather ineffective comebacks.

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