In the Covid-free Masters, no trace of masks, and back to the public. The edition in which, as an electrical storm threatens, training is suspended and there is nothing else to do but buy in the store – queues of 250 meters, boxes of more than a million dollars daily – Tiger Woods goes down a small hill on the 17th hole with an obvious limp in his right leg. “It’s hard for me to go up and down, but everything is fine, brother,” he intones.
José María Olazbal, who dined with him on Tuesday at the champions dinner, and who says “not for God”, when asked if he is capable at 56 years of age to pass the cut as happened last year, because he is also touched -tendinitis and bursitis in the right elbow-, he warns of the hardness of the challenge of the five-time winner of the green jacket. “If he’s come here, it’s because he thinks he can win. Obviously he doesn’t have the swing he used to because he has to adjust it and he has limitations, but I don’t think the game will suffer. He’s gained muscle and it’s not going to be because of the game” .
But the Basque also remembers that the Augusta National, a roller coaster, slopes of 7.3% on the fairway of hole 10, maximum slope of 65 meters between the peak, the tee of hole 1, and the creek of hole 12 is the hardest course played in the entire PGATour. “I’ll tell you that maybe Kapalua…”, she blurts out as a question.
And Woods, who takes small steps when climbing the hills like a hiker without a backpack, that’s what a caddy is for, he advances without a wince. The procession goes inside. Because he remembers that he won a big one, the 2008 US Open in Torrey Pines, with a broken anterior cruciate and two tibial stress fractures that he carried during the last two rounds and the 18-hole playoff.
Among the most iconic images of his career is the one with Tiger leaning on the driver as if it were a cane on hole 2 on Sunday. And with that pain, which everyone suspected was from his knee for having precipitated the return after having undergone arthroscopy just six weeks earlier, he managed to beat Rocco Mediate on the 19th hole of Monday’s playoff, 48 hours after announcing an operation that put him out of action for 8 months.
The anthology
That was the anthology of his career, superior to all in which he beats up others. The celebration of the putt that defined the tournament remains indelible in memory. It was also the last victory in the Grand Slam of the irreproachable Woods, before his fall into hell. A higher being. Until the 2019 Masters he did not put another notch in the Majors again.
It is not the only reference that rescues the memory to trust in a victory by magic. It happened in 1949 in the person of another legend like Ben Hogan, winner of nine majors, six of them, and two green jackets, after another brutal car accident crashing into a 9-ton bus that was trying to overtake a truck at 80 km/h
“It’s admirable what he did. It didn’t have the technology that I have now. Just the fact that he had to take hot baths in the middle of the night to be able to get up -they had to fix his vena cava, and irrigation to the extremities was already difficult and painful all his life- and give a blow is already incredible. If the treatments and the science didn’t move forward and I had to go through what he went through, I wouldn’t be playing this week.”
Hogan broke his pelvis in two places, an ankle, several ribs, the clavicle and the left shoulder. Also her left eye was seriously damaged. I spent two months in the hospital. She had several clots. It was thought he would never walk again, but just 17 months later he won a playoff at the 1950 USOpen and resumed his winning streak.
Woods wants to be Tiger and Hogan at the same time. And win the sixth jacket at age 46 like Nicklaus did. It sounds so good.
