Tiger Woods shot 77 and 73 at the Professional Golf Association (PGA) championship and missed the cut. My dad sent me a text the next day saying, “Tiger Woods will never win another tournament. His ex took his money, his balls, and messed with his mind.”
While the second sentence may be true, dad, you are sadly mistaken with the first sentence.
For those of you that do not know about Tiger Wood's history, google it. But the world needs to know one thing about Tiger Woods that I know will happen.
Tiger Woods will pass Jack Nicklaus in major victories and PGA tour victories and become the greatest golfer to ever live.
There are many reasons I make this claim.
Woods has always been regarded as one of the best putters in the game. He is right up there with the greats as one of the most clutch putters of all time. Who can forget his putt at the 2008 U.S. Open to force a playoff, or when he chased his putt at the 2000 PGA championship?
Countless young golfers show the same passion Tiger does on the golf course when they execute the Tiger fist pump after making a big putt on the golf course (which I have done myself).
The mental game is more important in golf than any other sport. Golf is a sport that is won in the five inch space between your ears. Tiger is one of those athletes that rarely falters on the mental side of the game. When the pressure is on, he goes into "Tiger focus" and prepares his brain mentally for whatever the field throws at him.
This is something that was tested in his personal life, and maybe his mental game has been thrown off because of all of his personal life problems. But Tiger will recover from this, and he will regain his mental game and return to his former mental self.
There is one more thing Tiger has over the rest of golf. When Tiger Woods steps onto that tee box on Sunday in a major championship, there is not one golfer out there that doesn’t think he can win. And if you are the golfer that has the lead on Sunday, you know that when you hear a roar coming from the ninth hole that Tiger made a birdie, and he is climbing up the leader board.
Tiger Woods has an intimidation factor that no other athlete ever had. Lebron James, Sidney Crosby, Alex Rodriguez, and Ray Lewis cannot even come close to the amount of intimidation Tiger has when he is on the golf course with a shot at victory.
I grew up on a golf course, pretending to be Tiger Woods on the 18th at Augusta with a seven iron in my hand and with the green jacket in my sights. I have seen Tiger at some of his best moments on the golf course and some of his worst moments. Anyone who says that Tiger Woods is done does not understand golf or Tiger Woods on the golf course.
Woods will be back next year and he will win a major. While his personal life may never be the same, by the time he stops playing golf he will have set every record and be the greatest golfer of all time.
To sum this all up, dad, you will pay me the 20 dollars you owe me when Tiger wins another tournament. Then all of the Tiger critics of the world who said he was done will retract every bad thing they said about him and his golf game.