Tigerworld - The Good, The Bad and The Just Plain Weird

We don't have Tiger to obsess over these days, but there have been some Tiger droppings sent to the lab for further analysis.  So, shall we step in them with the rest of the fellows?

The Good - Team Tiger has announced a new event to benefit the Tiger Woods Foundation:

Tiger Woods is hosting another tournament, this one for recreational golfers on courses that

include Merion and Congressional, and a gem north of Boston that a century ago was reputed to be the toughest U.S. Open course. 

The Tiger Woods Foundation, which has seven learning centers and funds the Earl Woods Scholarship Program, has been raising money primarily through five events. There's the Tiger Jam in Las Vegas (a charity concert and poker night) and the Tiger Woods Invitational (a private tournament for donors at Pebble Beach). The foundation also benefits from the Quicken Loans National and Deutsche Bank Championship on the PGA Tour, and his 18-man World Challenge in December. 

The latest venture is called the Tiger Woods Charity Playoffs. It's an amateur golf series that stretches over five months on eight golf courses, and it rewards the best players and fundraisers with a final event in Orlando, Fla., at the end of the year.

The concept is that two-man teams of amateurs will compete in a series of qualifying events at prestigious clubs around the country.  The cost for each individual player is a $500 entry fee plus a $1,000 contribution to Tiger's foundation.  

The venues are a bit of a mixed bag, offering access to private venues such as Merion, Congressional and Sherwood, outside of Los Angeles, but also throwing in a resort venue such as Innisbrook.  But the most intriguing name on the list for a geek such as myself is the Myopia Hunt Club, the intensely private fox-hunting club in Massachusetts that hosted four U.S. Opens between 1898 and 1908.  That would be quite the interesting place to see...  The events website can be found here.

I could be talked into Merion or Myopia.

The Bad - Folks seem to be waking up to the fact that Tiger won't be with us for a while.  I know, if they read this blog it would be old news.  Here's Gary Van Sickle from his short post that heads this week's Van Cynical Mailbag:

Tiger at the 2010 Ryder Cup.  

There is a dearth of information about Tiger’s microdiscectomy -- disc surgery on his back. There is a chance he won’t be back before the PGA Championship. And if he’s not back for that, he’ll miss the FedEx Cup series, too, since he currently ranks 200th on that points list and won’t qualify to play in them. 

Let’s not stop there. If he hasn’t played a tournament before September, could Ryder Cup captain Tom Watson really make Tiger one of his three wild-card picks for the team? Tiger would have to assure him that he’s 100 percent fit and ready to compete, but if he hasn’t played in anything that would be a difficult call to make. 

That’s a what-if scenario we don’t have to worry about yet, but it raises the reality of this situation. Tiger could miss the rest of the 2014 season. All of it.

He's not breaking any new ground here, but he is making a good point about the schedule.  Because of the structure of Commissioner Ratched's Reset FedEx Cup, Tiger will be boxed out by the silly schedule and basically have no place to tee it up to play himself back to form.

Now, not only has Tiger shown great indifference to and performed quite badly in the event, but Captain Tom is one of the guys that has called BS on Tiger and there's no love lost between the two.  We might just see Chris Kirk at Gleneagles after all.

The Weird - Care to take a wild guess as to what two women have become good friends and "talk all the time."  OK, time's up...that would be Lindsey Vonn, Tiger's current squeeze and...wait for it...Elin Nordegren, ummm...Tiger's former squeeze.  From US Weekly:

Talk about an unlikely pair! Lindsey Vonn has become very close friends with boyfriend Tiger Woods' ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, sources tell Us Weekly exclusively.

One insider says that Nordegren, 34, originally wanted to get to know Vonn, 29, because she knew the Olympic gold medalist would be around her children a lot. (The Swedish model and her pro golfer ex-husband, 38, have two kids

"After meeting her, she found she actually liked her," the source says of Nordegren, who finalized her divorce from Woods in 2010, after it was famously revealed that he had cheated on her with over a dozen women. 

"You'd think it would be weird, but Elin loves Lindsey and they talk all the time," the source tells Us. "Elin likes that Lindsey is a strong woman."

This could almost be in our separated at birth post.

I give Elin credit for how she's stayed out of the media since the split.  While I'm sure that's partly a contractual matter, it's also undoubtedly because she has her priorities straight.  This seems consistent with that mature approach.  But then there's this:

The source adds that the whole group recently went on vacation together, and that the fellow blondes occasionally took off on their own to grab drinks together, while Woods stayed with the kids. "Lindsey is really good for Tiger. She's strong, opinionated, and keeps him in line," the source explains. "Elin found that they are very similar and have a lot in common. They laugh and talk like they have been girlfriends forever."

My old college roommate had a similar situation with his ex and their son, vacationing together and getting along famously.  A mutual friend remarked that they were so sophisticated that the only thing missing were French subtitles.