Masters Final Round

[mikeyboy]

I have never met him , but i will say that anyone who has a camera stuck up his nose every daylight hour is entitled to let off a little steam .   

We have a sporting genius in the UK who is also not a saint ,  Ronnie O'Sullivan  the greatest player to ever pick up a cue .

Sport would be a far poorer place without these guys .

Mikeyboy 

[Clem Fandango]

I’m a huge huge Tiger fan and am totally over the moon he has comeback from all his injuries and issues. He is the GOAT in my eyes,others will at Jack,both are an excellent argument.

As for his off the course stories I remember one fri the Joe Rogan experience.

He had on Steve Schirrip who plays Bobby from the Sopranos. He used to work the doors around Las Vegas. He was talking about celebrates and tipping. He said that Leonardo Di Caprio gets up to a lot more than Tiger was getting up to in the clubs and restuarants of Las Vegas, the difference was Leo tipped everyone and tipped them well. $200 here and a $200 there and so on so on and always tip 25%.So if anything untoward would happen,paparazzi or a girl with a bad rep got involved everyone would make sure he knew and he was always appreciative. 

However he said Tiger was a shocking tipper. He knew a girl who was in his group and she had to stop going out with him as it was costing her to much in tips. He would spend 5-10k on food and drinks and leave a terrible tip. So her and the others would put money down when he wasn’t looking.

He also said David Copperfield just wouldn’t tip full stop, so when he used to turn up at a comedy club at the old Riviera they started telling him they couldn’t get him a table.

As I said I’m a Tiger fan,however was just throwing out a story.

btw the podcast with Rogan and Steve is a brilliant listen for any sopranos or Vegas fans. Very good it is.

[Taa_Saparot]

His father is in an unmarked grave ...... really?

 

Paul Kimmage on Tiger Woods: 'He may be back on top, but there's little reason to believe that he has changed'
Paul Kimmage April 21 2019 

The problem with being there was finding a place to watch. Every blade of grass was covered by a witness and the chanting had reached fever pitch as the Comeback King marched from the 18th green:

"Ti-ger."

"Ti-ger."

"Ti-ger."

Two attendants stood at the entrance to the clubhouse, staring at the swarm beyond the giant oak tree and breathless with excitement.

"Oh lord!"

"He did it!"

"He's back!

"Praise heaven!"

Inside, groups of well-heeled guests sat gathered around TVs as Jim Nantz and Nick Faldo put the pictures into words. "I never thought we'd see anything that could rival the hug with his father in 1997," Nantz observed. "But we just did."

"That will be the greatest scene in golf forever, Jim Nantz," Faldo replied.

"That hug with his children . . . if that doesn't bring a tear to your eye if you're a parent, you're not human."

But what if you felt nothing, Jim?

Blame Faldo. It was his defeat of Greg Norman at Augusta in '96 that sparked my love for the sport and a year later, when I travelled to my first Masters, he was paired in the opening round with a 21-year-old American being hailed as 'The Phenom'.

It wasn't hard to get excited about Tiger Woods. On the 15th, he hit one of the longest drives ever seen at Augusta and played a brilliant wedge to the green. And more than the roar when he holed the putt, or the joy when he went on to win, it was that moment that stayed with you. The elation of the crowd as the miracle swept across the golf course:

"Tiger hit a wedge to 15!"

"Tiger hit a wedge to 15!"

"Tiger hit a wedge to 15!"

Two months later, we followed him to Congressional for the US Open, Troon for the Open, Winged Foot for the PGA and Sotogrande for the Ryder Cup. We were there when he came to Waterville in '99, there for his 10-shot win at Pebble Beach a year later, and there when he completed the 'Tiger Slam' at Augusta in 2001. And the more we saw of him, the less there was to cheer.

His contract with Nike was worth $100m that year. He was getting $30m from Buick, $26.5m from American Express, and had signed multi-million deals with Rolex, EA Sports, Wheaties, and Golf Digest, but you would rarely see him signing autographs or engaging with kids:

"Tiger!"

"Hey Tiger!"

"Please Mister Woods!"

In interviews, he played his cards close to his chest:
Q: Somebody said when you won the PGA, you lifted weights before every round, is that right?
A: Maybe.
Q: Why are you being coy?
A: Why not?
Q: Can you not talk about your regime?
A: No.
Q: Trade secret?
A: No, it's just what I do. What I do is what I do.

And his stinginess was legendary.

In the book, The Pro, his former coach, Butch Harmon, tells a story about their first professional win together: "After his play-off victory in Las Vegas, Tiger sat in the press room answering questions while I went into the locker room to gather up the few things he had left behind.

"The staff congratulated me, which brought on another laugh. There was no need to congratulate me. I hadn't struck a shot all week. But I thanked them anyway. That's when it dawned on me that 
 
Tiger hadn't tipped the locker-room staff. He was 20, and even though he had signed contracts north of $40m, he still lived and acted like a college student.

"Tipping, an appropriate and expected practice on tour, hadn't occurred to him. So I gave the head locker-room attendant $300, not enough by any stretch, but all the cash I had on me at the time. 
 
A few minutes later I climbed into the back of the limo for the short trip back to the MGM Grand. 'Tiger,' I said, 'you owe me three hundred bucks.'

"'What for?' he asks. 'I tipped the locker room staff.' 'You gave them three hundred dollars!' 'Yeah, I would have given them more but that's all I had. I emptied my pockets.' 'For what?' 'Tiger, those guys took care of your stuff all week. They busted their butts in there.'

"'Yeah?' he said, not quite believing me. That's when I realised just how much Tiger had to learn, not about golf but about how the world worked."

Eight years passed. Woods kept winning and chasing greatness until eventually, inevitably, it almost destroyed him. His marriage imploded. He was shamed and humiliated but he kept pushing. It still wasn't enough. At the 2013 Masters, he incurred a two-stroke penalty for a rules violation in the second round and was savaged by critics for failing to withdraw.

A month later, there was another controversy at the Players Championships and another problem, five months after that, when he failed to call a penalty on himself at the BMW Championship in Illinois. Then his back started creaking and he started reaching for painkillers and soon the game - just playing - was extracting a terrible price.

But what did we know? What did we really know?

It was May 2016 when 'The Secret History of Tiger Woods', an extraordinary profile by the brilliant Wright Thompson was published by ESPN. Then, last April, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian brought us their astonishing biography, Tiger Woods.

That they start in the same place - a small graveyard in Kansas in May 2006 - is no real surprise for Tiger's devotion to his father was/is the key to everything he achieved. But try making sense of this (from the biography):

"Days later, when word got out that Earl Woods had been interred, the local business that produced headstones and gravestones - an outfit called Manhattan Monuments - anticipated an order for a large granite monument. They called Mohler (the gravedigger), but he had no information. Neither Tiger nor his mother had left any instructions for a headstone.

"At first, Mohler thought the family just needed time to figure out what they wanted. Everyone grieves differently, he knew. But five and then ten years passed, and the family still had not ordered a grave marker . . . In the end, Earl Dennison Woods was buried in the Kansas dirt in an unmarked grave. No stone. No inscription. Nothing. 'It's like he's not even there,' said Mohler."

And here's Thompson on Woods' obsession with the Navy SEALS: "Then there's the story of the lunch, which spread throughout the Naval Special Warfare community. Guys still tell it, almost a decade later. Tiger and a group of five or six went to a diner in La Posta. The waitress brought the check and the table went silent, according to two people there that day. Nobody said anything, and neither did Tiger, and the other guys sort of looked at one another.

"Finally one of the SEALs said, 'Separate checks, please.' The waitress walked away. 'We were all baffled,' says one SEAL, a veteran of numerous combat deployments. 'We are sitting there with 
Tiger fucking Woods, who probably makes more than all of us combined in a day. He's shooting our ammo, taking our time. He's a weird fucking guy. That's weird shit. Something's wrong with you.'"

It was business as usual for Woods last week after his extraordinary win at Augusta. It meant the world, he said, that his kids had seen him win, just as his "Pops" had seen him win, but he did not expand on the journey, or the lessons he had learned.

Maybe that's for later, when Jack's record has been smashed, but it was an itch I couldn't scratch when the press conference had ended.

I went outside and the buzz in the media centre was palpable. Champagne was being served but I opted for coffee, and was beginning to think there was something wrong with me when I happened upon one of the best writers in the US. "Well, what do you think?" I asked.

He face was a portrait of confusion and despair.

"I feel nothing," he said.