Watch It, Tiger, You’re Starting to Tee Them Off

All tuckered out from five weeks of playing golf, Tiger Woods, 20, took a richly deserved vacation this week from the rigors of keeping commitments, attending dinners and paying somebody else to carry your golf bag. Get some rest, Tiger. Only 30 years to go before that senior tour gig.

More than one PGA Tour member had a tsk-tsk for Tiger this week, after he withdrew at the last minute from a tournament in Pine Mountain, Ga., that sold twice as many tickets as it normally sells, as well as from an invitation-only dinner in Tiger’s honor that they had to cancel, rather than honor an empty chair.

Davis Love III, Curtis Strange, Larry Mize, these professionals understand the need to take a break, but each nonetheless scolded the new kid on the tee for being so inconsiderate. In Love’s less-than-loving words, “Everybody has been telling him how great he is. I guess he’s starting to believe it.”

Tiger Woods is the hottest thing in golf since John Daly, who was the hottest thing since Lee Trevino, who was the hottest thing since Arnold Palmer. Even the young Jack Nicklaus didn’t draw attention like Tiger’s. Crowds cling to him. Sponsors covet him. I suppose five weeks of that could wear a kid out, or else make his head too large for his visor.

Tour pro Peter Jacobsen went so far as to declare the honeymoon over, commenting, “You can’t compare him [Woods] to Nicklaus and Palmer any more, because they never did this.”

The irony for Woods is that he refused to lie. All he had to do was fib that he had come down with flu, or twisted his ankle, and Tiger would have been excused from his obligations with everyone’s blessings.

Instead, by telling the truth, that he was “mentally exhausted,” Tiger regrettably found out the hard way that honesty is the best policy in life, but not necessarily in golf. It made him look small and selfish, leaving town because he not only was too mentally exhausted to shoot a couple rounds of golf, but too mentally exhausted to come to dinner.

Some of his new peers shrugged their heads and played it droll, as Tom Kite did by saying, “I can’t ever remember being tired when I was 20.”

Others, though, were not amused. Pointing out that this particular tour stop, the PGA Buick Challenge, had granted Woods a sponsor’s exemption, Strange said, “This tournament was one of the seven to help Tiger when he needed help to get his [tour membership] card, and how quickly he forgot. But I bet the Buick people won’t forget.”

Buick is mother’s milk to pro golf, possibly its most loyal sponsor. Buick is to men’s golf what Virginia Slims once was to women’s tennis.

It was Woods’ last-minute jilting of the Fred Haskins Award dinner that most disappointed the Buick Challenge’s tournament director, Bob Berry. Months in the planning, the dinner had sold 200 expensive tickets, and Berry says that Woods told him as recently as Tuesday that he would attend the dinner. That very afternoon, Woods quit a practice round halfway through, then left town. The banquet had to be called off.

Woods’ caddie said to him, the player’s fatigue didn’t seem to be “anything a good night’s sleep couldn’t cure.”

Mize, a native Georgian hardly known as the most outspoken player on the tour, didn’t mince words, saying, “It was a big deal, Tiger coming here to play, and he was here. I think he should have stayed and played.”

Professional golf normally has as much controversy as professional bowling, so it is obvious what a lightning rod Tiger Woods already is, getting this much attention for doing something that older golfers do every week. And, if tennis fans had a nickel for every time an invited player reneged on an obligation, they would have a lifetime’s supply of nickels, although tennis players usually come up with the best excuses.

Five weeks into his career, Tiger’s no shrinking violet. His very first TV ads addressed the topic of certain country clubs that wouldn’t permit him to play. Weeks later, Tiger stiffed a country club that couldn’t wait to have him play. Well, you know Nike’s new motto. “Just Do It,” unless you don’t feel like it.