Golf / John Harms / 16 December 2009 / Leave a comment Bet Now

For all of Tiger's personal dramas, the real drama will be whether he can rise above his own psychological and emotional 'global warming' and continue to be a legend of the game, writes John Harms.

I’m surprised there isn’t a box in the top right hand corner of the front page with a number in it: Tiger Tally.

It's official.

Tiger Woods is bigger than climate change.

Bigger than Copenhagen and the ETS and greenhouse gases and the ozone layer.

Bigger than the emissions of China and India and the USA, all thrown in together.

Bigger than any of the political leaders who are trying to understand what is happening to our planet, and what might happen and how we might get on with each other, while still living comfortable lives.

Walk into the newsagent and take your pick: papers galore, walking out the door on Tiger's infidelities. I'm surprised there isn't a box in the top right hand corner of the front page with a number in it: Tiger Tally.

Usually, these matters are of little interest to me.

A sportsman caught sleeping around? Derh. A sportsman caught relieving himself in a laneway? Double Derh. A sportsman telling a few pork pies, thinking he's making his public life a little easier? Derh, again.

Usually, I couldn't care less and I'd be calling for sports reporting about sport, not the private lives of sports men and women.

In this case, however, I think there is a difference. Not because a lot of us feel we've been had--Tiger has been likened to the great prophets of human history, by people as silly as me! And not because we are disappointed there is a chance, albeit rather small, that Tiger won't play golf again.

No.

The reason this is of interest is because it must affect how he plays tournament golf. How can it not? And those of us who have struggled with the game ourselves are fascinated with what impact this is going to have.

That might sound a little callous in that we might also be concerned for his family life, and his well-being (poor Tiger?), but we do want to see what having a stuffed-up mind, like the rest of us, does to his golf.

We are somewhat different to Tiger: it didn't take liaisons with a dozen cardboard cut-outs for our golfing minds to be all over the place. Forty counselors on 40 couches couldn't disentangle the weird shit we brought to the golf course every time we teed up in the Saturday competition.

Jack Newton said in an interview recently, 'Golf is a psychological game.'

Derh.

Although, in a way, he is wrong.

Golf is the psychological game, and I reckon it goes beyond that: golf is a spiritual game. For what is form?

The brilliant thing about golf is, of course, that you (with all your troubles at home and work and at Rotary) can stand over a 5-iron on a 154m par 3 across water and Mulga and pestilence, swing it like honey and have the ball pitch metres from the hole, check and trickle towards the pin.

All is right with the world.

The downside of such a fine shot is in the understanding that if you can do it once, you should be able to do it every time.

Should. What a shocking word. A word of spiritual torment.

However, you are so filled with the legacy of failure and the attendant fear it brings, so filled with white-knuckle dread and with the fact that you've lived in your own skin for years, that you are filled with self-doubt. You stand over the golf ball not only facing the reality of your inconsequential existence, but also wondering where the hell it's going to go!

There is golfing shit in my head. And there is life shit.

The golfing shit:

For many years, I was a 6-handicapper at Indooroopilly, a fine sub-tropical track on the Brisbane River. To play to my handicap I had to break 80. Queensland golfers have a false sense of the game. The wind hardly blows, and it takes a single holiday on the Mornington Peninsula to learn how impotent a high ball-flight is (did someone say impotent?)

Often (enough), at Indooroopilly, I would walk off the easy par 5 12th, looking at a solid round. I would be in (monthly medal) contention. The 13th is a 185-metre shocker on the steep bank of the river, with 5-metre pampass on the left and a heavily bunkered peanut-green set at an angle.

'You're in this,' I'd tell myself, as I gripped the 3-iron. 'Don't hit it left.'

The rest is history and I continue to despise my own weakness, and my 13 handicap--but I'm going to work on that.

The life shit:

Too complicated and convoluted to go into in a short article, but that's the stuff we bring to the golf course, and that's why we are so fascinated with Tiger.

It's not the sexual gymnastics--it's that a flawed man will stand over his drive when he is (eventually) announced on the first tee of a course somewhere.

What will happen?

Intriguing stuff.

Nearly as intriguing as the reality that humans can (and probably will) oversee their own destruction due to Global Warming.

But that's an even bigger psychological issue for another day.