Twilight and dawn look pretty much the same, neither dark nor light, one a closing, the other an opening.
Tiger Woods has had his dawn. We all saw it. It arrived on time and burst into the brightest light in golf. Woods cast a shadow all of golf could use for shade, the tour, television, tournaments, the whole silly, jangling carnival that exists so that humorless young men can play an absurd game for other people’s money.
So much greater was Woods than the game he ruled that a fine and distinctive golf tournament held where I last lived and worked simply quit existing because Woods never played in it.
Woods anointed places with his presence and hardly ever seemed to be happy anywhere he was, including Augusta, Georgia, though I must admit that for 51 weeks a year the place is as unappealing and forlorn as a boarded storefront.
When Woods missed last year’s Masters because—let’s check the chart; pinched nerve this time—TV ratings dipped into cold war numbers and Augusta National pretended not to notice.
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That’s the way Augusta National is. It is as self-contained as a can of sardines, rarely touched by anything other than its own opinion of itself, not changing as much as drifting.
The Masters wishes for the greatest champions, assumes it deserves only the most esteemed shoulders onto which its corn pone chairman will place its exclusive and impractical green garment, and yet the Masters persistently turns up Bubba Watson or Jose Maria Somebody Or Other.
Maybe there will be another dawn for Woods, probably not, and unlikely to be soon. Certainly none will match the first one. Is the greater story exceeding your promise or breaking it?
And is this the second dawn, or the third, the sixth? It may be a dozen dawns by now. It is easy to lose count. Woods has come and gone and come back. He has stumbled far less than he has soared, but too often, especially lately, his lows blur his highs.
The most common image of Woods now is not his fist punch punctuating triumph but him shouting at himself or him holding his back. Or us seeing his back as he leaves early.
Woods has had his knees sprained, drained and reconstructed, his back poked and stretched, various discs and tendons dissected and adjusted, cysts removed and morals questioned.
And all of this with the world watching. That is, with the golf world watching. The real world and the golf world are as similar as swords and cotton swabs.
For Woods to seem now to be the pleasant, doting father, or to allow the perception of such, to seem softer and more agreeable to all that he used to disdain has a familiar and calculated feel and lasts as long as it takes him to miss a fairway.
Here’s the thing. The piano player cannot become the piano mover. Woods is not allowed be just another loose nut in the tool box, another peach in the basket, one of the matched socks in the dresser drawer. His goals were greater, his ambition grander, his reach longer.
His fate now is to be measured against himself, where once he was measured against the greatest. And he will do it alone.
He goes off to his nearly private island and plays on his very private course and pronounces himself ready to be inspected again at the most public events.
Our curiosity is captured each time and it will be until he runs out of denials or we run out of interest. The standard of judgment for Woods now is to concede that his latest round of golf was not as bad we thought.
Weep not for Tiger Woods, nor laugh aloud. Neither sympathy nor worship fit the man. He remains as alone in his struggles as he was aloof in his wonder, a novelty as always but a treasure never.
We do not feel his pain because we were never allowed to feel his joy.
We are seeing the lonely twilight of Tiger Woods, as much as we are allowed to. He will walk alone into the fading light.