(Written by Rob Courchene)
What if…
What if ‘Tiger Woods’ had been a television series? One of the great ones like M.A.S.H. or Seinfeld. People tuning in weekly to the scenes we knew so well. The red shirt, the fist pumps, the massive galleries, and Tiger Woods on the leaderboard.
Ah, the age of innocence. We all knew the characters. Hawkeye, Radar, Houlihan, Colonel Blake. Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, George…Newman. We knew them as friends, maybe even as best friends. In the glory days we knew Tiger in the same way. We knew his family, his friends, his clubs, his caddies, his swing in all its different forms. We even knew his coaches. Golf may as well have been listed as the Tiger Woods show on Sunday Afternoons.
But that is where it ends. Most of us remember where we were when we gathered with friends to watch the final episode of M.A.S.H., or Seinfeld, or even Mary Tyler Moore. We watched with tears of both joy and sadness (or at least I did), saying goodbye to characters that had been a part of our lives for a decade.
But what if ‘Tiger Woods’ had been a TV series. What if we could have said our farewells on a Sunday afternoon in June? What if the producers of ’The Tiger Woods Show’ had scripted the 2008 US Open as the series finale? Our broken, yet unbeaten hero limping off into the sunset? No surgeries, no crack in the armor, no kryptonite. Who knows, maybe not even a fire hydrant. Just a glorious Sunday/ Monday at Torrey Pines to bid farewell to our golfing hero. What if…
I think he deserved this much. Think of Jack and Arnie with their memorable walks up the final holes of Pebble, or St Andrews, or Augusta. Wayne Gretzky playing his final games in Ottawa and New York in the spring of 1999. (The game I attended in Ottawa remains one of the special moments of my life).
After this latest surgery even I have little hope of a return to Tiger mania. But I do have one wish. I would like the producers of ‘Tiger Woods’ to get it right this time. Maybe just one last walk up the 18th at Augusta…maybe even in a red shirt…and maybe, just maybe, on a Sunday.