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Celebrating the story of Tiger’s golf

Published

5 years ago

on

Mark Keohane, writing for IOL Sport

I loved watching Tiger on the prowl in the final round of any Major. The intensity, the expectation and the invariable delivery of unrivalled brilliance combined for enthralling viewing.

There was nothing quite like Tiger in his prime. There hasn’t been anything for me since Tiger tore down the house of golf and made it his own.

There have been and are wonderful golfers, but none gets the pulse racing quite like Tiger.

At least none got the pulse racing quite like Tiger.

His 15th Major win, against all expectation and 11 years after his 14th, was one for the romantics, but it was the nature of his previous 14 triumphs that defined him as the greatest of his generation.

I always enjoyed playing golf in my teenage years, but as an adult Tiger made me want to watch golf, more specifically, Tiger on that fourth and final day dressed in red.

The fall from grace that followed his 14th Major was as spectacular as his golf and his personal troubles were as documented as his professional exploits. His multiple affairs were given as many column and onscreen inches as his lowest and highest scoring rounds of golf.

His marriage fell apart, his golf went the same way and life as we once knew it, or thought we knew it, with Tiger was no more.

In the last decade, as a Tiger fan, I willed for that early dominance again. I knew it was fanciful thinking, but every now and then he’d produce that one or two rounds that spoke to the legend of Tiger and not the ghost that struggled through four rounds and, at times, never made it to the final two rounds of a tournament.

It was Tiger’s golf that I fell in love with. His personality, or reported lack thereof, wasn’t the reason I wanted to watch him play.

The softer and more accessible Tiger, who fronted the media in the past five years, was also not the reason I wanted to see him rekindle those glorious days in which it all started with a first PGA Tour victory at the Las Vegas Invitational in 1996 and a first Masters title, at the age of just 21, in April, 1997.

Tiger’s story has become his struggle when his story should only ever have been his golf.

My heart sank on Wednesday morning when I saw the headline that Tiger was in hospital, having been cut from the wreckage of a car accident.

Reports said he was alive but the wait for his condition took an eternity.

His one lower leg was crushed, his ankle was a mess and he had already been operated on.

I felt a sense of relief that he was alive because the memory of Tiger Woods simply couldn’t be that it would end with him speeding to a 7.30 celebrity tee-off, for which he was running late.

Woods, the golfer, never ran late. Woods, the person, clearly was as flawed as you and I.

In November, 2009, just a year after he had won his 14th Major, he crashed his SUV into a tree and a fire hydrant outside his home in Florida.

In 2010 he was divorced, with his second child Charlie just a year old.

Thereafter, his life was in freefall.

Golf’s modern god resembled a rank amateur shooting in the 80s and I am sure I was not alone in asking for just one more moment of Tiger.

We got it with his incredible victory at the Masters in April 2019.

And while the romantic in me dreamed this was another start for Tiger, the realist knew it was the end.

Thankfully, this is only a tribute to his golf and not an epitaph to a 45 year-old life.

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Golf

Why Gary Player continues to polarise opinion

Published

5 years ago

on

16th January 2021

By

Mark Keohane, writing for IOL Sport

Marc Player earlier this week described his father Gary as ‘tone deaf’ for accepting Donald Trump’s Presidential Medal of Freedom.

‘In Denial, Wrong!’ tweeted Marc of (Gary) Player’s decision to be honoured by the outgoing US President in the same week of the pro-Trump mob’s riot and attack on the US Capitol.

Player, a nine-time Major winner, and South Africa’s most celebrated professional golfer, is 85 years-old, but even in these twilight years there was no seeing the bigger picture. All that mattered to Player was Player. It has always been the case for Gary Player.

‘I really wish my father would have simply & amp (sic); politely declined this ‘award’ at this time, from this man (Trump),’ tweeted (son) Marc. ‘This is what I wished my father @garyplayer would have done and what I strongly urge him still to do. It is not too late to simply return it with gratitude & amp (sic); retain some honour, dignity and self-respect.’

Player, a brilliant golfer, has always polarized as a person because of his political views.

More significant than his nine career Majors and 24 wins on the PGA tour, were his comments, made as a 30 year-old, in his book ‘Grand Slam of Golf’

In the book, published in 1966, Player wrote: ‘I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and Apartheid.’

This week the on-line platform New Frame revisited Player’s infamous words and his absolute conviction as an ambassador for the Apartheid regime.

New Frame highlighted how Player declared that ‘a good deal of nonsense is talked of and indeed thought about segregation’ and insisted that ‘segregation of one kind or another is practiced everywhere in the world’.

Player then described South Africa as a ‘nation which is the result of an African graft on European stock and which is the product of its instinct to maintain civilised values and standards among the alien barbarians.’

This is the same Gary Player, who in 1965 described Sewsunker ‘Papwa’ Sewgolum as having ‘chipped like a man from Mars’ when Sewgolum beat him to the Natal Open Title.

Sewgolum, in Player’s world, may have been from Mars because while Player and his white mates enjoyed the luxury of the Durban Country club house after the event, Sewgolum was not allowed into the clubhouse to receive his trophy as the winner.

Sewgolum, born in a tin shanty in Riverside, about a kilometre from the then all-white Beachwood Golf Club, had to stand in the rain outside the clubhouse to be crowned champion because he was not white.

Player had no objection to that situation in 1965 and 55 years later the condemnation of Player was that he had no objection in accepting an honour from Trump.

The overseas media described the moment: ‘The legendary golfer who helped prop up the Apartheid regime will be awarded a prestigious prize by a president who has been accused of being a white supremacist and has made racist remarks.’

Player, in several books written on the Apartheid government, in the 1970s and 1980s aligned with the government to fight international sporting and business restrictions. Player was the government conduit for many business investments into Apartheid South Africa.

Player, as a sports person and individual, benefitted from Apartheid South Africa, and it was only once Nelson Mandela had assumed the presidency of South Africa in the 1990s, did Player very conveniently denounce Apartheid.

Player’s word and his actions were aligned in the prime of his career during Apartheid South Africa. He was a disciple of a whites-only world. But his failure to appreciate the consequence of accepting Trump’s Presidential Award showed that his post-Apartheid words on a democratic South Africa differ a lot with his actions.

Had Player seen the light and lived in that light, he would have politely refused his good mate Trump’s award.

Player loves to preach and loves to talk about his own virtues, his own professionalism and his own standards of excellence and integrity, but if you want to know about integrity Mr Player, give the record-holding six-times SuperBowl-winning coach Bill Belichick a call.

Belichick, at the helm of the New England Patriots, also got awarded Trump’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he did not accept it.

‘I was flattered by what the honour represents and admiration for prior recipients,’ Belichick wrote in a statement. ‘Subsequently, the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.’

Belichick, like Player, has always been a huge supporter of Trump and in 2016 described Trump as the ‘ultimate competitor and fighter’.

However, this week he wrote that ‘above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation’s values, freedom and democracy.’

On this basis, he said it was just not right to take the award from Trump.

Lawrence Donegan, on social media, wrote: ‘As @garyplayer accepts his little medal from a disgraced American president never let it be forgotten that in his prime Player was a blood racist and the global face of the apartheid South African regime.’

Who you may ask is Donegan, with his mere 870 Twitter followers?

For me he is an individual who powerfully, brutally and so accurately described the legacy of Gary Player, the person when most only ever fawn over the legacy of an iconic golfer, who won nine majors.

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