There are a few ways you can measure sports celebrity, but the best is probably the shutter click.
Nobodies get zero shutter clicks when they speak publicly because no one wants their picture.
Somebodies get a few. Superstars get a bunch.
Tiger Woods gets what sounds like a hailstorm every time he smiles or gestures or raises a glass of water to his mouth.
Roughly 50 or 60 cameras taking thousands of shots of a man sitting there looking bored two days before a golf tournament starts because they know someone somewhere will run them on a front page.
That’s fame.
They rolled Woods out on Tuesday for this purpose – to be famous in a new country. The locals were particularly excited to get some copy for the board of trade. One asked him if anyone in his entourage was playing tour guide.
“Sorry?”
Tour guide.
“Say it again?”
Tour guide.
“Tour guy?”
The Brit sitting alongside Woods on the podium gave in and translated.
The answer was no.
Later, Woods weighed in on the locale, where not so very long ago they were at war in the streets: “It’s just amazing that it’s been this long that it’s taken [the Open] to come back here.”
Tiger Woods – all-time golfer; not so hot on accents or contemporary European history.
But celebrity trumps content. All the Irish care about is that he’s here, in person, being the guy they remember from such television shows as all of them circa the turn of the century.
He’s 43 and still sucking up all the sport’s oxygen.
“If other guys had done what I had done, it would be a bigger deal,” the Woods of this generation, Brooks Koepka, said Tuesday.
By “other guys,” he means one other guy. And he’s right.
Koepka’s problem is he’s too generic. He looks like someone they found after putting out a casting call for “bro who golfs.”
Woods doesn’t look like that. In fact, he looks different than you may remember him, even as recently as three months ago – trimmed down, gaunter, older.
He hasn’t played much since that Masters, but his allure has increased exponentially. The cameras proved as much.
That win in Augusta pushed Woods’s story onto a new trajectory. No longer yesterday’s man, he can be whoever he wants to be. He’s spent the intervening weeks deciding.
So what we’re getting here on the coast is Tiger 6.0 or 7.0 or … I can’t keep track of which software release we’re up to now. There have been a few.
This version of Woods is postgolf while still mid-golf. He is of the sport as well as beyond it.
When someone asked him if his profession is still “No. 1 in your life,” Woods said something curious. For Woods, at least.
“No, it never has been.”
He went on to say that family is his primary concern – mom, dad, kids – and always has been.
I’m going to call shenanigans on that one. Woods was a prodigy. Prodigiousness is the result of fixation.
No prodigy ever began attacking her scales after getting home from prom. No prodigy ever said, “I’d love to hit a thousand more jumpers, but I’m busy spending special one-on-one time with my mother.”
They’re prodigies because they don’t do anything else.
So what Woods must be saying is that golf doesn’t matter like that any more.
He isn’t playing as often and says he never will again.
“If I play a lot, I won’t be out here that long.”
Which makes sense.
Sports are going this way in general. Roger Federer was the first superstar to adopt “less is more” as his war cry. Kawhi Leonard popularized the idea in North American team sports just last year. Woods is back on the cutting edge.
This works doubly well for him, since minimizing his exposure maximizes his value.
For instance, he’s still milking the Masters as a brand promoter.
“It took a lot out of me,” he said. “It was a very emotional week and one that I keep reliving.”
You’d think the guy had ultramarathoned across the Arctic Circle rather than got hot swinging a club for one weekend.
But Woods has finally twigged to what people want from him. They need him to be reflective, verging on maudlin. They want to know it hurts.
In the aftermath of that Masters win, he gave them nothing. Every tear-jerking interview softball was returned with force.
But after some reflection and maybe a few discrete consumer polls, he’s going that way now.
Viewers don’t even need him to be great all the time. They need him to be potentially great at predictable intervals in the year. Maybe as few as two or three.
Since world ranking means nothing in golf, there is no onus to do every tourney in Dubai. If he cares to, he can hit the majors and practise in between.
Even practice is overrated now. Koepka says he does very little of it and never plays unless it is for money.
“If you see me on TV, that’s when I golf,” Koepka said.
Relieved of the burden to be everywhere trying to make people forget he is no longer what he once was, Woods can start cruising.
Until winning at Augusta, it was generally agreed that his last, best chance to take another major was at The Open. The links play takes brute strength out of it. You can finesse your way through the course. The old Woods would be lasered in on this chance. Not the new Woods.
Asked if he is experiencing anything physically “outside the norm,” Woods took the out: “Outside the norm? No.”
So he’s injured somehow.
He also says he isn’t feeling as good about his game as he was before the Masters.
So he’s slumping. All the excuses are already in place.
That’s because he doesn’t need them any more. From now on, all Woods has to do is show up, read his lines and cash his cheque.
From this point forward, he isn’t the guy who had it all and blew it. He’s the guy who came back from all that and no longer has to care.
Cathal Kelly