Midweek Musings _ Tiger Presser Edition

I really wanted to take the morning off, but that was quite the weird performance by Tiger yesterday, and musing seems required.

I had promised to move on from the World Cup blogging, though yesterday's U.S.- Islamic Republic game was oh so entertaining and ultimately satisfying, as long as one kept thoughts of the Iranian players' personal safety at bay.  I did turn it on as the anthems were being played, and noticed that the Iranian players were conspicuously belting theirs out.  

But it so happens that I'm not the only soccer convert in the house:

 So, shall we Tiger?  Starting with the more mundane...

The WD and Future Schedule - Nothing too surprising or controversial here, just not much in the way of actual information.  Though who doesn't enjoy some actual humor?

When asked if he could name all 206 bones in the body, Tiger Woods didn’t miss a beat in cracking — pun intended — a joke.

“I know of the ones that hurt, OK?” he said, breaking — pun intended — into a smile.

Maybe a titch more forthcoming here:

“It was a tough decision just because I want to play. I like playing, I like competing, but unfortunately, I can hit the golf ball and hit whatever shot you want, I just can’t walk,” he

explained during a pre-tournament press conference on Tuesday. “I’ve had a few setbacks during the year that I still was able to somehow play through, but this one I just can’t. Only time can heal this one and stay off my feet and get a lot of treatment done.”

“The worst thing you can do is walk, and I was walking more and more and more, trying to get my legs ready for this event, and I just kept making it worse,” Woods said. “So had to shut it down and unfortunately, be the host of the event and Ranger Rick out here.”

This as well:

Woods said he will require a month or two of rest to allow his foot to heal properly.

“It was the ramping up process that did it,” he said. “It’s a balancing act, right? How hard do you push it to make progress while not pushing it too hard to go off the edge and you set yourself back two, three days, and that’s been the balancing act the whole year. And trying to do that, get ready for this event, I did a lot of beach walks trying to simulate the sand out here and my foot just did not like that very much.”

Ranger Rick was another good bit...This is SOS territory, though understanding that he just doesn't know:

As for his future plans, Woods made it clear that his schedule in 2023 will be — at best — limited once again.

“The goal is to play just the major championships and maybe one or two more. That’s it. I mean, that’s — physically that’s all I can do,” he said. “I don’t have much left in this leg, so gear up for the biggest ones and hopefully, you know, lightning catches in a bottle and I’m up there in contention with a chance to win and hopefully I remember how to do that.”

But this is the curious bit on this subject, one in which Tiger goes into his defensive crouch:

Woods casually mentioned that, due to playing, he’d undergone “a few more procedures.”

He didn’t have much interest in elaborating. Here’s how that went, Woods grinning all the while:

TIGER WOODS: I had a couple surgeries, yes.

Q. Can you elaborate?

TIGER WOODS: Nope.

Q. Can you say when?

TIGER WOODS: In the past.

Q. In the past.

TIGER WOODS: This year.

Q. Thank you.

TIGER WOODS: You’re welcome.

Twenty-five years of this nonsense... Though, perhaps the funniest bit is the header on the Golf.com article:

Freewheeling Tiger Woods lets loose in Hero press conference

The OWGR -  I find his take very curious, both on the merits of the argument as well as its implications in the larger existential struggle:

On the OWGR: “Yeah, OWGR, it's a flawed system. That's something we all here recognize. The field at Dubai got less points than Sea Island and more of the top players were there in Dubai, so obviously there's a flawed system. How do you fix it? You know, those are meetings we're going to have to have. We're going to have to have it with World Golf committee and as well as our -- the main tours that are involved in it somehow come up with a better system than is in place now.”

Note: the system was revamped and unveiled in August after years of discussion. Tiger might want to check out Joseph LaMagna’s case here that the new system is a “dramatic improvement” over the old one.

A few reactions.  His argument seems to be that, because Dubai had a few top players, that it automatically had a stronger field, whish is just nonsense.  If he had a concern about the relative weighting of top players vs. depth of field, I'm all ears.  But the new system is not "obviously flawed", so sod off, Tiger.

But in the context of the LIV battle, this is an extremely odd argument to be making at this point in the process.  I though Tiger had chosen sides, and his side favors full field events...

Except, that he's not an impartial observer on this subject, he has a vested interest in this week's event, for which he is presumably handsomely compensated, receiving OWGR points for a twenty player field.  That's usually called a conflict of interest.

On LIV - Some BS flung before he gets to the bit that everyone has seen:

On LIV vs. the PGA Tour

Looking back a year, Woods said, he wouldn’t have foreseen the golf world undergoing such a dramatic shift.

“And the animosity from both sides. I don’t think we would’ve seen that a year ago,” he said.

He had some choice words for LIV defectors, objecting to some of the pros who left and “the way they showed their disregard or disrespect to the Tour that helped them get to that point.”

Woods appreciated some of the players who were more up front about their reasons for leaving — namely money — but added that he found others “a little bit on the tasteless side.”

OK, a little disjointed and incoherent, but nothing he hasn't hinted at before.  Then he gets weirdly personal:

He saved his most direct words for Greg Norman. Echoing Rory McIlroy’s plea from a couple weeks ago, Woods made it clear: “I think Greg has to go, first of all,” he said.

He reiterated that idea several more times, referring to a potential “opportunity.” He said as currently constructed, both leagues can’t coexist.

“Not with their leadership, not with Greg there and his animosity towards the tour itself. I don’t see that happening.”

Later he said it one more time, for good measure:

“I think Greg’s got to leave and then we can eventually, hopefully, have a stay between the two lawsuits and figure something out.”

That last bit got at another important note from Woods’ side: the willingness to potentially compromise with LIV. He seemed to call for two actions from LIV’s side — that they ditch Norman and drop their lawsuit against the PGA Tour — and implied that if those two things happened, discussions could follow. He didn’t get into specifics; it’s still unclear what a compromise would actually look like or if either side is interested in finding it.

“Then we can talk, we can all talk freely,” Woods said. But it’s clear those discussions are hardly imminent and, as he added, the window is closing.

I love Geoff's graphic, but what's going on with the concerted effort to decapitate the Shark?

Believe @TigerWoods either directly or indirectly called for @LIVGolfInv CEO @SharkGregNorman to be removed from his position seven times during news conference @HWC2016

— Rick Young 🇨🇦🇺🇦 (@YoungerGolf) November 29, 2022

Contra the headline writer above, that's the opposite of freewheeling, that's reading from talking points.

Did you ever peg Tiger as an Alinskyite?  Because he's following the playbook faithfully:

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. "

I'm struggling to decide how I feel about the strategy, about which I have misgivings.  I start with the premise that Norman is not a critical factor in this mess, and that his buffoonish pronouncements and little hissy fits (remember his "Are you serious" letter to Jay?) aren't actually all that helpful to the LIV effort.  There's also the fact that he made all sorts of promises to the players (the Tour can't suspend you) that, left to fester, could lead to red-on-red conflict down the road.

The other factor that concerns me is that Tiger taking on Norman is Tiger punching down, and that never works out well.  he also punches down in our next excerpt, but with pretty disastrous results.

What Does It Mean When His Nose Grows? - Talk about your unforced errors:

Asked if Phil Mickelson deserved an apology for efforts to get PGA Tour players paid more: “No, absolutely not, no. We took out an enormous loan during the pandemic in which that, if we had another year of the pandemic, our Tour would only be sustained for another year So we took out an enormous loan. It worked, it paid off in our benefit, hence we were able to use that money to make the increases that we've made.”

Clean-up in Aisle Three!

The PGA Tour clarified today that it did not take out a loan to deal with the pandemic in 2020 as Tiger said during his news conference.. . The Tour used reserves and "mitigating actions'' and would have seen a significant reduction in reserves w/o a return to golf in June 2020

— Bob Harig (@BobHarig) November 29, 2022

Well played, Tiger!  You just got your ass fact-checked by Phil, which is basically like getting dunked on by Paulina....

This has been going on since February and Tiger doesn't have a better answer than that at hand?

The reserve argument should be a loser for Phil, given that retention of those reserves might allow the Tour to survive Phil's treachery.  It's circular reasoning, but kinda works, no?

Phil has told huge whoppers in his jihad against the Tour, and you'd think these guys would be a little better at using that against him.  Instead, Tiger is just making crap up (is that what they meant about "freewheeling"), so both sides will be similarly tarred.  And this is the Tour's last line of defense?

The other obvious point to be made is that, esoteric arguments about proper reserve levels aside, Phil's response to not getting his way is to actively attempt to destroy the PGA Tour.  There's hundreds of other guys trying to ply their trade on the Tour, which Phil is all to happy to destroy.  No one put him in charge and there's a governance infrastructure by which the players govern the Tour, but that wasn't Phil's choice of venues.  He prefers the scary mofos, and strange that none of this came up from Tiger.

Very frustrating, but I'll leave things here and get on with my day.  I almost certainly will take tomorrow off, and make it up as we go along thereafter.