Charl Schwartzel Won The Masters.
This is the headline because in a year everyone will forget who won this year. The South African with the difficult phoenetic name will be forgotton until the 2012 Masters roles around; unless the world ends as forecasted. Unlikely doomsdays aside the the moment that Americans will remember from the 2011 Masters will be the rebirth of the Tiger Woods of Old.
Tiger roared back into contetion early in the forth and final day of the tournmant. Shooting a -5 on the opening nine holes Woods pulled within one stroke of the leaders. He fell behind only to Eagle the 13 hole and gain a tie for the lead. Then his round ended.
He finished the round tied for the lead, but with 5 golfers tied with him and 4 of them with more holes to play. The odds were against him as he sat back idle and watched. He bared witness to multiple lead changes and finally a strong push by the Unheard of Charles Schwartzel to win the masters in his first ever time at the competion. This main shouldnt have won. Tiger Woods would have won that tournament he just simply ran out of holes to play. I would argue that this is the moment Tiget gets his life, and golf game, if the two can even be seperated at this point. Back together.
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The Masters is a classic American Golf Tournament.
I agree that this is absolutely the rebirth of Tiger Woods, but I disagree with the statement that Tiger would have won if he had more holes. Tiger was stellar on the front 9, but fairly average on the back 9. Do not take anything away from Schwartzel either, as he birdied the last 5 holes, sinking long putts the likes of Tiger continued to miss.
ReplyDeleteNext year we may forget that Schwartzel won, which has become a common occurrence in golf. Golf is a better game when Tiger is playing great, which we started to see for the first time this weekend. Tiger is back and we should all be ready for some major titles from his this year.
I wrote an article on how I was torn on who I wanted to win the masters, none of my guys won, but I don't agree that if Tiger had more holes he would have won. Like Blaine said, Tiger had a great front 9 but mediocre back 9. Yes, this was definitely a comeback year for the great Tiger but Schwartzel played a great round of golf. He deserved to win but he won't get much attention for it.
ReplyDeleteIt's like most of the sports world, the big dogs always get the attention even if the little guys are better. Take the NBA Finals right now. Memphis is about to upset #1 San Antonio yet the news is all on the Lakers and the tied series with the Hornets. LA should have blown them out in 4 games but nope and they are still getting the attention. The players who can make the news the most money will always get the most attention.
I am hesitant to say definitively this is the “rebirth” of Tiger Woods as a golfer as a man. As a golfer, he has yet to win a tournament and merely finishing in the top five at a famous event still does not put him over the hump. As a man, well I am not sure when that rebirth might come because I don’t know him nor pretend to know him, and no amount of public relations or polite behavior will ever convince me he has changed, nor that he had to change in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI will, however, agree with the fact that this was a ‘rebirth’ of some sort. It was a rebirth of Tiger as a brand in the eyes of the public. As Bill Simmons wrote about in a recent article on the issue for ESPN, for the first time in a while it seemed that everyone was pulling for Tiger, and everyone was rooting not just for tigers best interest, but for our own collective best interest. As a nation, we have taken all the superstars of sports we have and tried desperately to tear them down. We judged Tiger for doing something most American’s are guilty of doing themselves, and took comfort and glee in that judgment. We needed him to be the bad guy, if only because we had created a sort of armor for him as being perfect, and couldn’t admit that the fabricated armor might have had chinks in it. Still, the public, not the man himself, created this image of Tiger as perfect and as a morally superior human, transcending the most intrinsic elements of our nature. Once he proved us wrong, inevitable in this age of TMZ and paparazzi, we banished him for a certain period.
It felt, as least emotionally, the other Sunday that for the first time we had accepted him for being human, and wanted him to succeed so that he could prove that public resurrection, is, in fact, still possible in modern society.