Dominance is a tricky thing.
In a sporting world that places so much emphasis on training, research,
and meticulous athletic perfection, it is almost impossible to dominate a
sport. It is the best against the
best. Everyone has access to the same
body-building supplements, advanced equipment, and personal trainers. It is a level playing field, filled with
hundreds of dedicated professionals whose life goal is to be better than
you.
I am not just talking about winning a bunch of games or
setting records. Dominance is so much
more than that. It is about controlling
the pulse of the sport year after year, winning championship after championship
until you become the standard manual for how the game should be played. It is about defying the odds, achieving the
unimaginable despite injury and controversy.
It is about being consistently better than the best in the world.
Your name becomes synonymous with the sport itself.
Babe Ruth was baseball; Michael Jordan was basketball;
boxing had Ali; swimming, Phelps; tennis, Federer. These guys all dominated their own segment of
sports history. Yet, as great as they
all were, each is eventually replaced by a new generation of athletes.
Once in a while there is a changing of the guard, and some
of the most iconic moments in sports occur when we witness the old usher in the
new. Back in 2003, Kobe and Jordan were
dueling on the same court. Nadal and
Djokovic are challenging Federer’s monopoly on greatness. Young rookies like Robert Griffin III are
taking the NFL by storm. Seventeen
year-old Missy Franklin is the new darling of the US swimming team.
Yet, no sport fully captures this seismic shift like golf,
partly because no player has really dominated a sport like Tiger Woods. For over a decade, Tiger was golf’s poster
child, winning fourteen majors and over 100 million dollars in tournament
earnings. In every sense, Tiger
literally was golf. Many of us would
turn on the TV not to watch golf, but to watch Tiger. We wanted to see him crush drives down the
middle of the fairway and sink puts on impossible greens. We wanted to see that red Nike shirt on
Sundays. We wanted to hear his
celebrations and see his glorious uppercuts swinging through the air. I usually hate watching the same people win
over and over, but Tiger was an exception.
He made me want to play golf. He
made me want to watch a sport that has less contact and lower scoring than
soccer.
But the glory days are over.
Golf has changed, and Tiger is no longer the dominant, red-shirted
clutch machine that he used to be. While
most of the news is still focused on Tiger, it is less about his victories and
more about his challengers. While the
passage of time has slowly separated Tiger from the sex scandal of 2009,
something is just not right. He cannot
control his temper; his putting is not what it used to be; he cannot pull away
in the third and fourth rounds of tournaments.
Meanwhile, everyone around him seems to be getting
better. After Greg Norman commented that
Rory McIlroy – the curly-haired Irishman who has nine top-five finishes and
four wins this year – “intimidates” Tiger, the reality of Tiger’s demise may be
setting in. Although Norman may have
overstated Woods’ fears, he does make a good point. Tiger is no longer untouchable. He misses drives on the 18th hole
and pushes birdie putts wide of the mark.
He chokes, has mental lapses, and even misses the cut.
And although it sounds sacrilegious to denigrate golf’s
iconic player, why shouldn’t Tiger be intimidated by Rory? At twenty-three years old, the kid reminds
Tiger of everything that he used to be.
It is like playing with a flashback of your past. Rory outdrives him, putts better than him,
and plays without all the distractions and controversies that Tiger faces.
I’m not saying that Tiger is not good anymore. He still finds himself near the top of the
leaderboards, and at thirty-six years old, he even has a reasonable chance to
break Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major wins.
But other golfers stand in the way.
So while he may not be intimidated by Rory, Tiger no longer
intimidates everyone else. He has been
wrenched down from his tower and brought down to our level. He has ceased to be dominant - it is anybody’s
game now. The Tiger era is coming to an
end.
