With Tiger Woods you never know

Some farewells begin with a photograph, as if the present sensed that there will be no better opportunities in the near but uncertain future.

The images are pure symbology and seeing Tiger Woods on the Swilkan bridge, accompanied by Jack Nicklaus and the sum of his legends, set off all the alarms among those of us who refuse to accept the obvious: that the Tiger race has entered, this time yes, in its final stretch.

Any day we will wake up with no greater ambition than to gobble up a good breakfast or not lose our job, and then, like we just came out of the printing presses of hell, we will find ourselves with the fatal news of his definitive goodbye.

The first time my grandmother Concha didn't recognize me, with Alzheimer's marking territory under her hazel hair, we decided to take a picture next to her little pylon.

From there she saw us arrive when we went to visit her, immersed in those dog-faced competitions of hers with the automatic washing machine every day: she never held her in high esteem.

It was her comfort space, hidden behind a window that only fulfilled its original function in one direction, her hands cold and wrinkled from so much rubbing, from showing the world so much that technology was not capable of reaching the limits of its own devotion .

And it is the certainty of knowing they are special —the same in a grandmother as in a great sports star— what pushes them not to stop voluntarily, to wait for the forced withdrawal while everyone around them insists on the well-deserved rest.

"You don't forget about me, I'll be doing it," she told me that day, half embarrassed for having been scared as soon as she saw me.

And in those is Tiger, bridging the gap.

His limp is so obvious that one wonders how much pain a god can take for the sheer joy of being one.

Golf has a reputation for being a well-to-do sport, far from the maximum physical demands that other disciplines imply, but any fan without prejudice is capable of imagining the level of torture that completing an 18-hole course entails for a human being —deep down it is , although it may not seem like it—whose leg was twisted between the bodywork of his car until the multiple fracture just 15 months ago.

To his various knee and back operations, the result of a career full of explosiveness and self-demand, was added the misfortune of everyday life, that moment that can change anyone's life, be it Tiger Woods, a fishmonger from Muros or a Siena pizza maker

Smiling next to Nicklaus, allowing himself to be photographed for those who need images as a memory mechanism, Tiger does not intuit the wounds that could jeopardize his true objectives.

Anyone else would feel like a triumph to be in Saint Andrews and appear at hole one with no greater desire than to make a worthy round, but Tiger Woods is not anyone else.

Emulator of John Silver,

, and with the bad memory of his retirement from the PGA still fresh, Eldrick Tiger Woods still doesn't know the pleasure of appearing at the big tournaments to collect delayed applause.

It will not be easy, or even likely, that next Sunday we will see the Tiger lifting the Claret jug at St. Andrews for the third time.

And yet no one in his right mind would dare rule it out.

Precisely, the last judicious who bet against him were the doctors who tried to recover the citizen Woods for normal life and found Achilles competing in his Augusta garden just a year later.

I suppose they had the happy idea of ​​taking a photo with such a stubborn patient before his return to competition, for whatever might happen.

Life could once again grant them the opportunity to be photographed next to the most human Tiger but, how to say it: with the gods and the grandmothers, you never know.

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