Let Sleeping Dogs Lie Files: Tiger and His Stanford Regret
During Tiger's rebranding/Foundation 20th media tour, he understandably didn't have much to talk about given the state of his game. This unfortunately led to the strange comment of only having one regret: leaving Stanford with two years of eligibility remaining.
This opened the door for this analysis of the many reasons Woods had no choice but to flee Stanford. From GolfDigest.com's John Strege, who closely covered Tiger's junior and college career and said the comments "ring hollow".
1. The NCAA’s influence. It began when he was a high school sophomore and had accepted an offer of an honorary membership at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach. The NCAA was concerned that Woods might be jeopardizing his college eligibility. The NCAA eventually ruled that that there was not a rules violation.
Once Woods started at Stanford, several NCAA conflicts or potential conflicts arose, among them: Writing diaries for magazines from his first Masters appearance, warranting a one-day suspension; using, in the same Masters, balls and equipment not provided by the university in potential violation of rules. “If you look at this situation objectively,” his father Earl said, “this is the perfect opportunity for Tiger to say, ‘kiss my yin, yang’ and leave school.”
Woods also was suspended briefly for having lunch with Arnold Palmer at the Silverado Resort and allowing Palmer to pay for it. “I don’t need this. It’s annoying,” he said.
Tiger was also mugged by someone who knew his name, reason enough for most of us to get out of Palo Alto!
The SI/golf.com gang kicked the topic around in this week's Tour Confidential and if you can handle the constantly wiggling web page, the discussion is interesting. From Gary Van Sickle:
VAN SICKLE: Tiger isn't delusional, he's utterly competitive. What's delusional is that he regrets leaving Stanford, where he was mugged at knifepoint on campus by someone who knew his name, and that he could've possibly remained eligible for NCAA or amateur golf after his first two years and all that went on. Other than that, it was close to the vest and, to be honest, kind of a snooze despite Rose's best efforts.
Sunday, October 23, 2016 at 09:52 PM
Reader Comments (31)
Tiger is like the arrogant defense attorney who asks the wrong question and opens himself up to new scrutiny, which he then resents.
Perhaps this is a combination of the NIKE media training and as teammate Notah Begay has revealed, the guy is really just a nerd.
Geoff, I know you have a great sense of fashion.. Can someone please call Steiny and explain that at 40 yrs old, a man generally should know how to wear a dress shirt that fits and not have the collars hanging over the lapels of your coat and the tie is properly tied.
I'm not saying the guy goes with west coast prep, but a stylist wouldn't be a bad idea if these revealing nike interviews are going to continue..
Promote a Tournament not benefiting TW. Commit early, do a few intervies, sell some tents. And do it one on one- not from behind a desk in a media center. go see the sponsors, visit a tent, play a pro am round and smile. People don't hate Tiger because he's misunderstood. They hate him because they DO understand.
I'll be honest - I'm pretty shocked the largest thread isn't about Tiger saying he could still (and will) pass Jack's Major record ... that was a pretty ballsy thing to say and I was expecting the regular amount of Shackelford lighter fluid to be squirted around so ya'll could set TW on fire for opening his mouth (as usual).
The issue is, it was understood at the time that he was asked to leave because of the very clear violations of amateur status and NCAA rules...so suggesting he simply made the decision to turn pro on its own merits isn't exactly square...
Tiger fanatics won't stop believing until Tiger is, oh, sixty five years old or so. ("But, Snead contended in a PGA Championship when he was 62....")
We know enough about his life to create a list that his closer to the truth.
Tiger Woods' REAL List of Regrets
1. Getting caught with p*rnstars and hookers while married.
2. Getting caught with a pancake waitress while married.
3. Getting married.
4. Using the "wholesome family shtick" to increase attractiveness to potential sponsors.
5. Reliance on the career-shortening left-knee-postup-and-snap. Helped to win early majors and the expense of career longevity.
6. Not retiring his dad from any career involvement by 1999.
7. The blue velvet curtain mea culpa with invited guests.
8. Maintaining a team of enablers.
9. Not being able to create a new generally acceptable public persona of himself post Thanksgiving 2009.
10. No retirement plan B that involves the reality of the tragic missed opportunity of not catching Nicklaus' 18 and securing undisputed greatest of all time status and dealing with the fact that he wrote his own punch line.
Not THAT would have been one heck of a Charlie Rose interview.
Look, if I was offered a $60 mm job at the end of my sophomore year, and i had won the US Am three years in a row, there is NO WAY i am hanging around. And if regulators are asking around about whether i used the free golf balls i found in my locker or let a mentor pick up a dinner check, so much the faster. So yeah, i don't buy it.
He should have hung around for "the college experience"? Well, some of us think he got a lot of that anyway....
I really think its a tie between #1 and #5--others are WAY down the page.
Ask Ms Wie as well.
"The late Frank Hannigan, the former director of the USGA, was the only one with the guts and knowledge to identify Woods’ “amateur” career as a sham, that his father was paid to fund his son’s golf then to deliver him to IMG, which delivered him to Nike even before he technically turned pro.
Hannigan concluded that the USGA didn’t, in Woods’ case, enforce its rules on amateurism — it gave Woods a free pass — because it feared accusations of racism."
Even Bob Jones made money from golf (later in life) spare me the amateur ideals.
Herb, I'd rather eat in the kitchen with the "help" rather than in the dining room at some of these places I've played. Better class of people. And nothing I said implies I think golf should be for rich people only, or the aspirational, to use The Donald's precious term. I have nothing against rich people, being one myself when wealth is averaged out over the whole globe. It is a first world problem in deciding Bettinardi versus Cameron, Titleist versus Bridgestone.
And yes, I'm a crank on the rules of and reinstatement of amateur status. Guilty as charged. But the USGA has had no credibility on the issue since they bounced Francis Ouimet because he worked (key word) at the Wright & Ditson in Boston back in the mid-late teens of the 20th century.
Anyone who claims he has no regrets in life (or just one...) is either lucky or a liar. Or in Tiger's case, perhaps both. The truly maddening thing about him though is that he can say stuff like he misses Stanford while essentially being the kid who can sit in front of a mindless video game for days on end. What is becoming more and more apparent as time goes by is that the dissonance he arouses in us has to do with how a human can be possessed of such an extraordinary physical grace while being totally lacking in its mental equivalent.
Well stated. He's definitely a case of arrested development coupled with an OCD slant well suited for singular pursuits.
Every NCAA athlete can accept any piece of equipment from a manufacturer. I think this includes trackman.
But free rounds out of competition at private clubs is a source of tension. I think if college kids generally in the area are allowed in (like Wolf Run during the Mashie) is kosher. But if Myopia wants to have Harvard out for a weekend, not kosher.
Stupid.
Amateurism was created because rich aristocrats didn't want the hoi polloi in their games, so they decided that despite the fact people were paying money to watch you compete, you could only compete if you were not paid. Well, in the days of needing to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week if you weren't rich, guess who had time to acquire the skill needed to compete at such a level? Kind of worked out well for the blue bloods, didn't it? Don't forget how the golf professional was considered just above dirt(probably only because the caddies were already there). Not only that, I know one random story of a baseball player who was declared a professional, because he had been paid to referee a soccer game!
The stupidity of the whole amateurism movement only narrowly outdistances the silliness of pining for a return to such conditions.
Is tigers dad being hired by Img really much different than Uhlein having full run of Titleist TPI and footjoy?
Or can only wealthy take advantage of their head starts?
I couldn't take a full scholarship at a D2 school because I was making 10 bucks an hour mowing greens, but two guys in my team has full rides and were members at the club I worked at. Guess what it's a tough world, many successful people pull all stops to help their kids