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The Tiger Woods revolution turns 25

2022-03-31T20:54:47.366Z


At 46, the American is fighting to play the Augusta Masters, the tournament in 1997 that opened a new era in golf


Tiger Woods almost died 13 months ago.

He lost control of his car at 140 kilometers per hour, on a stretch of 70 outside Los Angeles, and the vehicle ended up as a jumble of iron.

He saved her life, but his right leg was shattered.

For a golfer with a body full of seams, with five back surgeries and five knee surgeries, it seemed like the end of a majestic career, with 15 grand at the top.

But the myth did not want to retire in a hospital, but rather fighting on the green.

Since then, the 46-year-old American has taken extremely slow steps towards a miraculous recovery.

And if there are miracles, for Tiger Woods they happen in Augusta.

There he swore to win the green jacket "because of how they had treated blacks", there he achieved his first big one, the first one he played, 25 years ago, in April 1997,

there he was resurrected with his 2019 triumph. There, for the Masters that begins next Thursday, he wants to return.

This Tuesday it was tested in the 18 holes of the course.

The world of golf is waiting to know if Tiger will return, a quarter of a century later, to the origin, to the place where the greatest revolution that an athlete has starred in his sport was born.

In 1995, when he played the Masters as an amateur (41st), Woods left a note in his locker before returning to Stanford University, where he had class on Monday.

“Here I have left my youth behind to become a man,” he wrote.

The following year he shared a practice round with Jack Nicklaus, the golfer who 10 earlier had set the record for majors at 18.

The Golden Bear opened up to him: “The field is perfect for you.

You're going to win as many green jackets as Palmer and I put together [four plus six]."

The prophecy sounds exaggerated today – Tiger has dressed in green five times, the last one in 2019, 14 years after the previous one – but it symbolizes the enormous impact he already caused.

That 1997 Masters was the first major that Tiger played after turning professional seven months earlier.

He followed his habit of getting up between four and five in the morning, without an alarm clock (“getting up at six was falling asleep”) and running a few kilometers.

It was his way of clearing his mind.

He was already a star who had been introduced with the Nike ad: "Hello, world."

In the first round he accompanied Nick Faldo, the defending champion.

They hardly exchanged a word — “when I play, I put on my armor,” says Woods — and things started badly: 40 shots, four over par, in the first nine holes.

This is how the protagonist relives it in the book The Masters of my life: “While I was going to the tenth tee, half a dozen security guards surrounded me.

I noticed all eyes on me.

Some spectators said that he no longer had anything to do.

So my father's [Earl, former Green Beret] military experience helped me.

He had trained me to be a ruthless killer in the field and put into practice what he had learned in the army.

As a child I told him that he should make me tough inside.

And he started using psychological warfare and prisoner of war techniques on me… I needed him to push me to the point where I didn't want to continue.

We agreed on a code word for when I couldn't take it anymore.

But I never used it.

I wasn't going to give up… 'Fuck shit!', He told me.

'How does it feel to be a nigga?'

Those things.

Nothing was happening.

They told me as I grew up.

I heard it at school and at tournaments.”

Tiger came back, signed 30 strokes in the second nine holes and from that moment on he swept everything away.

With the field and with the rivals.

With rounds of 70, 66, 65 and 69 shots, he delivered a card of 270 shots, -18, a record only surpassed in 2020 by Dustin Johnson (-20).

Woods remains the youngest winner in championship history, at 21 years and 104 days, and the winner by the widest margin, 12 shots ahead of Tom Kite.

The Italian Constantino Rocca shared the last 18 holes with Tiger, the round of a Sunday in which he was already unattainable.

"He was nine ahead of me, but I thought I could fight him," recalls Rocca, 65, from Bergamo today;

"it was impossible.

He hit it really hard, sometimes wide, but he always came back amazingly.

It was a show.

He had it all.

And a concentration with 21 years… mentally it was not normal, very strong, always very concentrated.

Even if he missed a hit, he wouldn't go away.

He was a robot.

He was just to control that hulking power.”

Tiger himself couldn't stop thinking about it that night.

“Was it really happening?

Was he going to make me the youngest winner of the Masters?

Would that victory give opportunities to minorities?

What would it mean for black players who had suffered because of the color of their skin and hadn't had the same opportunities as me?

There was only one way to find out.

Win the green jacket.

The time had come to do something that had never been done before,” Woods confesses in the book.

So he dressed in red—his mother's favorite color, originally from Thailand, where it symbolizes the last day of the week;

also the color of Stanford—and yes, he made history.

Tiger was only the fourth black player to set foot in Augusta, following Lee Elder, Jim Thorpe and Cal Peete.

His triumph was not just a racial revolution—every employee on the course, most of them black, left their jobs to see Woods crowned himself—It changed golf forever, in every way, a shake-up the likes of which a golfer has never experienced. sport in charge of a single athlete.

The gyms opened their doors, the prize pool multiplied by 10, the sponsors grew... Even the Masters began to change the field to make it longer.

Nicklaus said that Tiger had turned Augusta into "nothing."

seve and clinton

Chema Olazabal, ranked 12th, still relives that exhibition impressed: “It was physical power and mental power.

With the stick, he had a power that nobody could reach, one more gear.

And in the head, he never gave you respite, in the crucial moments he did not fail.

I was surprised that he later wanted to change his

swing

when he had dominated like that."

That young Tiger had absorbed the wisdom of Seve Ballesteros (winner at Augusta in 1980 and 1983) and Olazabal (1994 and then 1999) like a sponge: “It was lucky to spend time with Seve training in Houston.

They called him El Mago because of his short game.

It is what he was.

I came to think that near the greens I could do almost everything with the ball.

He spent hours teaching me.

We practiced until dark."

On the Monday before the 1997 tournament, Woods trained with Seve and Olazabal.

That lesson of the two Spanish teachers was engraved on fire.

“It was a master class.

His golf reminded me of the jazz improvisations that my father loved so much.

Seve and Ollie were improvisational geniuses.

They gave me a lesson in clever punches."

Upon completion of his work of art, Tiger hugged his father in tears.

The doctor had told Earl that he should not travel.

He had nearly died (in fact, he was clinically dead) from a heart attack, and he was very weak.

But he flew to Augusta.

Tiger reminds him of the night before the Masters, lying in bed, giving him advice on how to put his hands when kicking.

When he struck the last blow, there was dad (as in 2019 Tiger hugged his son Charlie his).

Before entering the press room, US President Bill Clinton called him, and that night he fell asleep hugging the green jacket like a child hugging a stuffed animal.

Today, 25 years later, physically broken but with the same passion, Woods wants to dream again in Augusta.

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Source: elparis

All sports articles on 2022-03-31

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