Editor’s note: We are not big golf fans, but we watched the Masters this weekend to see this historic sports comeback. As The New York Times observed, “Woods’s victory on Sunday had an epic feel to it.”
“Tiger Woods completed a comeback from personal and professional adversity on Sunday, capturing his fifth Masters title and his 15th major tournament with a victory that snapped a decade-long championship drought and instantly returned him to the top of the sports world,” as The New York Times is reporting.
“It was a monumental triumph for Woods, a come-from-behind victory for a player who had seen so much go wrong on the course and off after his personal life began to unravel on Thanksgiving night in 2009.
“Woods triumphed on Sunday in almost stoic fashion, playing with shrewdness and determination over the final stretch of holes while the other players who were grouped with him on the leaderboard took turns succumbing to the pressure of trying to win the Masters.
“Only when he tapped in his final putt did Woods let loose with a joyous shout that revealed how much the victory meant to him.
“At 43, Woods now becomes the second-oldest winner of the Masters, behind Jack Nicklaus, who won here in 1986 at the age of 46. Woods’s victory immediately reverberated beyond golf and, for that matter, sports.
“The win led to a rare moment of agreement between President Trump, who tweeted, ‘What a fantastic life comeback for a really great guy!’ and his predecessor, former President Barack Obama. ‘To come back and win the Masters after all the highs and lows is a testament to excellence, grit and determination,’ Obama tweeted.
“Woods’s victory on Sunday had an epic feel to it. Here, on arguably the sport’s biggest stage, was its seminal figure, suddenly back on top, which is where he was a decade ago when everything suddenly went sideways for him.
“What followed back then was a long, painful period of his life, in which his body repeatedly broke down and his marriage collapsed. But after prevailing on Sunday, Woods finds himself back in the pantheon of the sports world’s biggest stars, back on a level with LeBron James, Serena Wiliams and Lionel Messi, back in a space he entered with his first Masters victory in 1997, when he was a skinny, 21-year-old a year removed from Stanford who declared “Hello World” in a classic Nike commercial.
“The long drought Wood endured between major championships — his previous one came at the 2008 United States Open — would have once seemed inconceivable. The same could be said for the 14 years it took for Woods to finally win his fifth title at Augusta National, a course so suited for his game that Nicklaus once predicted that Woods would collect more than the combined 10 Masters titles that he and Arnold Palmer, the first two golfing titans of the television age, won there.”
The rest of the article is here.
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