Tiger Woods’s fiercest opponent is Tiger Woods himself

We’re all rooting for Tiger Woods here, rooting for him to get his life, physical and psychic, in a better place. If this were Tiger v. Phil or Sergio or Chris DiMarco you might have a different rooting interest. This, of course, is not that. Tiger became Tiger by often defeating, though not always, Phil & Co. That was fun, that was sport, that was drive and execution as most of had never seen before. This is different. This is Tiger versus himself. Tiger versus the pain of life.

Woods is a 50-year-old athletic icon — a true icon in an age of hyped everything. He has two children with his ex-wife, who has three other children with her current partner. Tiger has a girlfriend with five children of her own. The girlfriend has a former father-in-law who is both the most powerful person in the world and the man who gave Woods his highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, after winning the 2019 Masters. Woods won 14 Grand Slam events in a 12-year span. Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas and a host of others came of age in the decade-long wait between No. 14 and No. 15, the 2019 Masters.

Twenty-two months after that victory Woods drove off the side of a deserted Los Angeles County road early on a weekday morning, into a tree and nearly to his death. Don’t call it an accident — that would be an insult to the scores of people who did everything in their power to save his life. Don’t say that winning takes care of everything. The marketing people at Nike who trotted out that phrase in the wake of a long-ago Woods scandal were ultimately just trying to move product.

The great tragedy of modern life is that everything has turned into a product. Golf is a product, per PGA Tour brass. Journalism is a product. Clicks are monetized. It’s deadening. Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus and Watson were dominating golfers and unique personalities who captured our imaginations. But they weren’t products. Tiger Woods has been packaged and sold since he was 3. Woods knows his state of mind that morning in February 2021, when he was pulled out of another wrecked car. Cry for help is a hoary cliché but that crash had to be a cry for help. In the end, not a very loud one. His crash last week, a mile or so from his South Florida home may prove to be a louder one.

This time, his hand was forced, just as it was after his 2017 DUI arrest by police in Jupiter, Fla. In golf’s various and cloistered circles — on Golf Channel, on websites and in newsletters, in a release from the CEO of the PGA Tour — Woods’s statement on Monday was met with relief and admiration. He said he was “stepping away for a period of time to seek treatment and focus on my health.” You hope, of course, he can get the treatment he, by his own admission, needs. But there’s more going on here.

As this second DUI charge in Florida goes down its jurisprudence road, prosecutors were going to require that Woods seek treatment. Woods is trying to avoid a jail sentence here, of any length. He’s trying to avoid the spectacle of a public trial. There’s nothing for him to fight here. There are lawyers and advisors deep in his life. Signing up for treatment, on a voluntary basis, was a smart and necessary first step in an effort to keep a bad situation from getting worse.

Woods has been down the treatment road before. In early 2010, some weeks after running over a fire hydrant in the middle of the night outside his home in the Isleworth development near Orlando, Woods reportedly went to a residential treatment facility in Mississippi to deal with addiction issues. His 2017 plea required counseling as well. A statement is a statement. Last year, when Woods turned to X to announce his relationship with Vanessa Trump, he wrote, “Love is in the air and life is better with you by my side!” Please insert air quotes around wrote. Does that sound like Tiger Woods to you? Monday’s sober announcement has a completely different tone, of course. We don’t know anything about Tiger’s state of mind, and he doesn’t owe us that — or really anything.

What he owes us is what every driver in the world owes every other driver and pedestrian and bicyclist and stray pet in the world, and that is alert, uncompromised driving. After his crash on Monday, you can see Woods in photographs on the side of the road, golf shirt neatly tucked in his shorts, glasses on, cellphone to his ear. In those grainy photos, he looks like what he’s looked like for, well, over many years now, iconic golfer on yet another comeback trail. Photos can fool you like statements can fool you.

Tiger has pain and sleep issues. He’s acknowledged that many times. As an athlete, his glory days are long behind him. He knows that, of course. He likes to say, “Father Time is undefeated.” People take pain meds because they are in pain. People drive while impaired because of some level of arrogance, along with self-absorption. People go to recovery to figure out some kind of path forward. Sometimes it works. Because we love golf, because we admire what Woods did as a golfer, Tiger’s issues are getting attention here. In every other regard, he’s another guy trying to figure it out. Except he has to do it with the whole world watching.

We don’t know who Tiger Woods was talking to on his cellphone, when he was on the side of the road Friday afternoon. The single most impressive thing he could have done that day is apologize to the person driving the truck that was pulling the pressure washer. Luckily, the driver wasn’t injured. But his day was turned upside-down, too.