An Open Letter to Tiger Woods

Dear Tiger,

As one of your biggest fans, I wanted to write to you to tell you how disappointed I am in the way things seem to be going in your world of late.

You've always been my hero mostly cause I'm a golfing nut and I am baffled at what you can do with a golf ball, but also more on a personal level, because you were the very definition of strength, composure, focus and bottle - things I wish I had more of. Everything about you always seemed so admirable and honest. Until recently...

Your personal life is your business and its clear to those who watch and take interest, that no matter what you say in carefully controlled speeches (probably written by your management company), that you dont really think you should have to explain yourself to people like me.

When you consider your upbringing and the honour and integrity your parents seemed to drum into you, it would have suggested you would treat yourself, family and fans with the same values but now I liken you more to Michael Jackson - someone who missed out on their youth cause you were so busy being a prodigy and exploded in all the wrong ways some way down the road.

Back to the apology speech. If someone has said to me months ago you'd see Tiger Woods up grovelling about infidelities to the world, I would have laughed. You put forward no emotion to suggest you really meant any of it (except when asking the press to leave your family alone of course). I never thought I would say this, but it felt like we were watching a sleazy politician address the nation to dig himself out of a hole.

When news broke that you had been with more woman than I've had 3 puuts and pledged to put your career on hold to save your marriage, I couldn't help but thinking that the timing was all just a bit too well timed with your usual want to avoid golf between November and February. The real sacrifice I guess Elin would have been looking for, was for you to miss one or more of the majors (the only tournaments you seem to think are worth playing any more). And here you are, coming back in time conveniently for the first of the year. You really made your point with that one eh?

Then there was that "rehab" thing. What was that all about? If someone had told me that the greatest sportsman of all time, a man who man considered super human, had gone to the lows of trying to kid himself that seeing a therapist would "cure" his inability to keep his hands to himself and vindicate himself with the public, I just wouldn't have believed it. This kind of trash behaviour is usually reserved for the super deluded element of Hollywood that live on another planet, so to hear you going down this route really killed it for me.

Just another celebrity with too much money and power and whose lost all sense of what is important in life. So sad.

I'm sure like many I will be glued to the TV when you grace us with your presence as even if you were a bank robber, it would still be hard to deny your ball striking is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

But the mystique of Tiger Woods is gone and I'm quite gutted to say that.

I hope you get it together as the hopes of millions of seeing Nicklaus's record broken, are in your hands.

Sincerely,

A Fan.

Golf is dependent on Tiger Woods

My favourite golfer, who is probably bigger than the overall game of Golf, is returning at the US Masters.


I am, of course, referring to 14-time major winner Tiger Woods.

This is exactly what the game needs, because without Woods there's no star quality in the field. No golfers worth talking about. No excitement at the majors. And half the viewers only watch golf when Tiger's playing; which shows how dependent golf is on its talisman.

Watching Tom Watson battle Stewart Cink in a play-off doesn't quite live up to watching Woods. Or watching chokers like Garcia and Mickelson throw it away again.

You get my drift. Golf needs Tiger to make the sport worth watching again.

Gain 15 yds off the Tee

Well I finally got out to play golf for the first time this year and tried a couple of new things. One of those was my new TaylorMade R9s and they were great, but that's another story all together.

One of my goals this year was to lower my spin and get a little more distance off the tee, I just didn't think it would be this easy. I usually tee the ball about an inch or two behind my front foot. Yesterday I was messing around and started putting the ball about an inch in front of my left foot. The result was amazing, the flight was a much higher lower spinning shot. I mean these things were bombed. I was hitting both types of shots on pretty much every hole for comparison and I walked off at least 15 yards farther on EVERY tee shot with the new method.

What this does is have you hit the ball on the clubs upswing producing a higher launch angle with less spin. It may feel a little weird at address but it wasn't too much of a problem with me. Mess around with it a bit and see if anyone else has the success that I did. Oh yeah, and make sure to tee the ball pretty high.