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I'm not saying he's done, but it's not gonna be easy for him to catch Jack. Something to think about:
Spoiler [+]
My good friend Michael Rosenberg wrote something last week that struck me as wrong, and I could not quite figure out why. He was writing about Tiger Woods, and it began with how sick he is of reporters asking Tiger about his personal life. I agree entirely with that. But then Michael wrote this:
I have no idea how Woods will play this week. But I do believe two things:
1. The people who write him off are dead wrong.
2. Those people are doing him a favor.
Something about this just plinked off-key for me… but I wasn’t quite sure why. At first, I thought my disagreement was with his No. 2 statement: That people who are writing off Tiger Woods are doing him a favor. I don’t see that at all.
Here’s why: I’ve long thought that Tiger Woods (unlike many great athletes) does not feed off of being UNDERESTIMATED, but quite the opposite — he feeds off of being OVERESTIMATED. He has spent his entire golfing life building up an aura of invincibility — see his name come up on the leaderboard and cower in fear. When Woods is in the lead, golfers try too hard to pull off shots that are not in their bags because they know — they KNOW — that he won’t give it up. That’s his game. Rattle them. Intimidate them. Make them fear him. I have no idea how Woods would handle being underestimated, and nobody else does, either, but I don’t think it fits him at all. Tiger Woods is a frontrunner, the best in the history of golf. Every major championship he has ever won — all 14 of them — he won from the lead. He is Goliath. He has never shown even the slightest inclination for becoming David or, anyway, I haven’t seen it. I don’t think he’s suited for a slingshot.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn’t Michael’s second point that rubbed me wrong. No. It was No. 1. He wrote: “The people who write him off are dead wrong.