McIlroy not just a rival to Woods, he’s the antidote
Paralysed by indecision once again, he screams: “Why can’t I just have two heads?”
The golfing public might just think the same this weekend as they walk the ropes at Augusta — metaphorically at least — with golf’s two top men.
All week, the narrative has been tightly scripted. It’s golf’s past and its future, Tiger and Rory, who will go swing for swing over four days and in HD. Though the real plot is as yet unwritten and likely a lot more nuanced than a Rory-Tiger duopoly, it’s certainly exciting.
Like those who have enjoyed McEnroe-Borg, LeMond and Hinault or Cork and Tipp rivalries down the years, we’re lucky, no matter what develops under the stormy skies this weekend in Georgia, they’ll have a few more years yet of going head-to-head on Sunday evenings.
In the run-up to this most anticipated of Masters tournaments, there’s been more column inches generated on the pair than feet driven from an Augusta National tee box.
But two particular articles seemed to bring home the stark contrast in personalities that so often mark the great rivalries.
The ESPN heavyweight columnist Rick Reilly — so often a cheerleader in print for American sporting icons such as Lance Armstrong and Tiger himself in more innocent times Stateside — set about a root and branch examination of the golfer’s family tree.
The former Sports Illustrated back-pager centred his influential column this week on the siblings with whom Tiger has had no contact since the death of their influential father.
Kevin Woods, Tiger’s brother, half-brother Earl Jr and sister Royce told Reilly they haven’t heard from Woods in six years, since they buried the ashes of their father, Earl Sr.
The three are the children of the man in the cap that you’ll remember named his youngest after an old Vietnam War buddy and seemed to live three paces behind his prodigious offspring in those glorious early days, swaddled in a green jacket.
Kevin, Reilly reports, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2009, and is in need of a caregiver at his home in San Jose. And it is, sadly, a home he’s set to lose.
“I leave updates on Kevin, but for whatever reason I don’t get a response [from Tiger],” Earl Jr tells the journalist. “Kevin loves Tiger. A call from Tiger would really pump Kevin up. When he doesn’t call, it just makes him feel worse.”
Champions need that to be tough, we know. But, it’s one hard man that won’t pick up the phone to his ill brother.
The latest revelation — if you buy it — is one which seems to have resonated more than the entire contents of The Big Miss, the tell-all book published by a former swing coach Hank Haney.
Since before its publication this week, those of us interested in the Michael Jackson-type golf world within which Tiger exists, were offered a sneak peak into this particular Neverland.
Tiger is a ‘nerd’ who considered giving it all up to become a Navy SEAL, was a bad tipper and didn’t give autographs to kids. He didn’t even share his ice-cream, we’re informed breathlessly.
As they instructed us in the Leaving Certificate English exam, compare and contrast Tiger’s screening of his ill brother’s calls, with McIlroy’s behaviour in the wake of his collapse on the final day of last year’s Masters.
“I actually didn’t speak to him until the following day,” his mother Rosie remembered this week.
“He rang me in the afternoon. I was more upset than he was, I think. He said, ‘mum, it’s only a game of golf. That’s the way it goes’.”
Tiger may well win another green jacket this weekend and he may well reach the top of the hill, on which he’s been focused for so long: Jack Nicklaus’s 18-Majors record.
But what awaits on the other side of the horizon for Eldrick?
* adrianjrussell@gmail.com Twitter: @adrianrussell
