ORLANDO, Fla. — The focus is back where it always burned brightest, on the guy whose various injuries and comebacks have garnered the laserlike attention akin to all the golf records he set.
Tiger Woods was on a golf course again, a crowd of thousands following him in a pro-am. It was amazing to witness, knowing what we know.
A year has rambled by since he last did this, at the same Ritz- Carlton Golf Club where his son, Charlie, then 11 years old, stole the headlines at the PNC Championship.
Padraig Harrington, the most recent European Ryder Cup captain, who had his battles with Woods throughout the years, is just as curious as the rest of us. He chuckled at the memory of pronouncing at the 2020 event “The Charlie Show.”
“For once, Tiger is not the story,” Harrington said then.
Tiger Woods is now — and that was obvious on Friday. Golf Channel wasn’t breaking in to show live pro-am shots were it not for the momentousness of the occasion. Woods was back on a golf course, hitting shots, looking good, nearly 10 months to the day that he was involved in a horrific car crash that could have claimed his life.
The injuries were extensive to his right leg and foot, and only recently has Woods felt good enough to appear in public. For months, he stayed in seclusion, needing a wheelchair. When he finally graduated to crutches, he joked that getting around his mansion in South Florida was more of a chore than he realized.
A few weeks ago, he appeared at his foundation’s Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, doing his first interviews and proclaiming he had a long way to go — all the while hitting balls on various days at the Albany course, showing there was still some game left.
That he has taken it to this point — even if he is riding in a golf cart — is impressive. The story isn’t so much about Charlie, whose exploits as a 12-year-old now are impressive. And yet, Charlie is the reason Tiger is here.
“Completely,” said Erica Herman, Tiger’s girlfriend. “[Tiger]…
Source : espn
