Rick Reilly on Tiger Woods

A golf columnist/commentator, Rick Reilly wrote recently wrote an article that shredded Tiger Woods into tiny pieces. A friend of mine sent me the article and commented that it was "a great article!" My response follows:

Why is this a great article? I think it was written by a snide, jealous, angry person. Reilly is a good novelist and a typically shitty critic. Reilly is rooting against Woods; it's pathetic when a person like Reilly attacks the very person who indirectly was responsible for making his career possible. (Would "No good deed goes unpunished"apply?)

Woods did more for the sport of golf than anyone who ever played it since the shepherd in Scotland who was first to swat at a stone with his crook on the links land later to become St Andrews Golf Links. Woods is undeniably responsible for creating thousands of golf related jobs, for elevating broadcast ratings that returned a few billion in advertising revenues, for elevating purses providing hundreds of millions of dollars and Euros to charities as well as those lucky enough to play on professional tours world-wide. We were all lucky to have been able to see Woods play. If he never hit another ball, he still played the best golf I've ever seen and I'm grateful that I lived to see it. I don't care if he never signed an autograph, stiffed a car valet, or slept with every woman in the state of Florida. I don't condone how he behaved, but he ruined his own life, not mine.

As for expecting Woods to be "Mr Personality", who the hell is Rick Reilly or anyone else to expect Woods to live up to their standards. Its nobodys business what Woods does. Ben Hogan never gave anyone the time of day. Neither did Sam Sneed, or Raymond Floyd, Curtis Strange or, for that matter, Jack Nicklaus for the first several years of his career when jerks like Reilly, who now sing his praises, were derisively referring to Nicklaus as "Fat Jack". Nick Faldo was a prick. So were Johnny Miller, Hale Irwin, and Gary Player. There were many more golf "greats" who could have been added to this list of miscreants.

Woods was a phenomenon and no one, especially not an egotistical jerk like Reilly, could ever relate to or begin to understand such genius. I wonder what demons motivate people like Reilly who revel in seeing another person fall.

Albiwan