How to Play the Mountain Wins Again
T iger Woods's first real retentiveness of the Masters is of watching Jack Nicklaus play on the Sunday of 1986. Woods was ten and had been out to play nine holes with his dad that morning but they were dorsum in front of the TV in fourth dimension to see Nicklaus, then 46, come up circular the plough in ane of the most famous rounds in the history of the majors. From six shots back he made five birdies and an eagle and won by one. Woods remembers watching him hit that famous second shot on the 15th, from the colina over the water and to 12 anxiety from the hole, and the style he raised both fists in the air to celebrate, and wondering why he was so happy when he still had to make the putt.
Over the years Woods has asked Nicklaus, more one time, what he was thinking about in that moment. Woods never really got a good answer out of Nicklaus simply, according to his book Unprecedented, this is the way he has come to think about information technology: "He did what he needed to do to put himself in a position to win the Masters. He was not thinking about winning. He was thinking only nearly the shot and what he needed to do. He wasn't getting ahead of himself."
Thirty-half-dozen years subsequently Woods is 46 himself, a month older now than Nicklaus was when he became the oldest human being to win the tournament. And of course he is planning on breaking that record. No ane, non even Woods himself, gave him a chance of doing information technology after the automobile crash last Feb, when he lost control of his SUV while he was doing double the speed limit on a stretch of mountain road exterior Los Angeles. No i even idea he was going to make it here this year. "I never left my hospital bed even to see my living room for three months." After that he still had months in a wheelchair, and on crutches, in and out of surgery, while they bolted together his leg "with rods and plates and screws".
"To say then that I was going to be here playing, and talking to you, it would have been very unlikely." He did non wake up that first day in hospital with the thought of making information technology dorsum here. Back and then information technology was 50-50 whether they were going to accept to amputate his leg. Instead Forest has gone about the recovery 1 stride at a fourth dimension. Like Nicklaus he is doing what he needs to practise day-by-day to go far a position where he tin win the Masters one more time. He is convinced he tin do information technology, as well. And because he is Tiger Forest, who is going to say he tin't?
He even so does not really take all that much mobility and does non wait to ever again; and he is in pain "each and every day". But here he is anyhow. "Information technology's a matter of what my body'south able to exercise the next day, and the recovery. That's the hard part," Wood explained.
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"It gets agonising because uncomplicated things that I would normally just do now accept a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there to prep and so air current down." The thought of simply walking the course for four days in a row is daunting. "It's up to me to suffer all the pain" and his medical squad to help him manage the rehab. "How I am going to get all the swelling out and recover for the next twenty-four hour period."
"Merely I feel like I tin can however practise it and I feel like I still take the easily to do it; the body'southward moving expert enough." This is a homo who won the 2008 U.s.a. Open up while he was conveying two stress fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament, who won the 2019 Masters 2 years after he had undergone spinal fusion surgery.
"I've been in worse situations and played and won tournaments. Now I oasis't been in situations similar this where I've had to endure what I'm going to try and endure, that's a different challenge. Just my back surgeries and all the stuff I've had to play through before, those are all things I can draw upon where I was successful."
Woods once said that his win hither in 2019 felt like his Everest and that, having climbed it once, he did not experience the need to do it again. The injuries gave him a mountain to climb and a new reason to try and do it, too.
Woods did not only lose command of his car that night; he lost control of his career, as well, and for a time the question of whether he was ever going to exist able to play, to compete, to win, again, was taken out of his easily. Which would be difficult for anyone just must have been utterly intolerable for a homo who has spent his whole life defying the limits other people have tried to put on him.
"I don't know how many more years I can still do this," he said at one point. Simply while he yet tin, he still will, however much it hurts.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/apr/05/tiger-woods-prepared-to-play-through-pain-barrier-in-unlikely-masters-quest