Dan Says

I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong. Well, maybe second. I thought that when Tiger Woods came back from his time off that he would come back stronger than ever. I said that the last thing Tiger needed was more motivation to win tournaments and thought that he’d come out and win tournament after tournament. I was wrong. It turns out, very wrong.

Tiger is playing terrible golf. He’s playing some of the worst golf of his career. Then it hit me: what if Tiger is playing badly… on purpose.

Now, I’ll admit, the premise is a bit of a stretch. It’s difficult to imagine that someone with the competitive drive of Tiger Woods would be willing to take a dive. In addition, you could argue that he’s going to jeopardize his sponsorship money, but let’s take a closer look.

For starters, he probably isn’t jeopardizing that much sponsorship money by playing badly right now. It seems that the major companies that are going to drop him have already done it. The ones that remain are willing to weather the controversy storm for the time being and probably wouldn’t drop Tiger just because he has a bad season.

Secondly, the main reason I thought that it might be possible that Tiger is playing terribly on purpose is because it’s actually helping his image. That’s right, playing badly is helping Tiger Woods in the public eye.

Tiger can make the argument that he’s playing such terrible golf because he’s so distracted and distraught over what has happened in his personal life. Now, being upset about what happened certainly won’t make everything all better, but showing genuine remorse for his mistakes will certainly help his image in the eyes of some of the public. In addition, people hate sports figures that always win. Everyone hates the Yankees and the Lakers and whenever Tiger would play in a tournament, so many people would cheer against him because he’s “won enough”. They would say, “Give someone else a chance! I’d like to see an underdog win.” Well, now Tiger is that underdog. Believe it or not, arguably the most talented golfer in the world has become the underdog in every tournament that he goes into. Everyone loves an underdog.

Now I’ll admit, the idea that Tiger is purposely playing bad golf is pretty far fetched. The more likely reason that he is playing badly is because he’s genuinely distracted by what has happened in his life. Either way, Tiger’s coming out ahead, by falling behind.