The news of Tiger Woods not playing at the 2014 Masters hit April 1, and I honestly thought it was an April Fool’s joke.
All day long I had been wading through news I wasn’t sure was to be taken seriously or not, then the Tiger headline dropped. After a few minutes of reading and getting my facts straight, it turned out to be the truth.
Alas, the man, my all-time favorite golfer, won’t be teeing off Thursday morning in Augusta.
I love the Masters for a lot of the same reasons I love baseball season. It’s springtime. The weather is gorgeous (minus the torrential downpours we have been having here in Southwest Georgia). Easter is approaching and everyone is slowly putting on less and less clothes, trying to get a little sun after a cold winter. These are things happening when the Masters comes on, and you have to love it.
Some might say it’s the best weekend of the year. Aside from Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll agree.
But with Tiger off the table, a lot of the hoopla surrounding him has been removed from the tournament and now festers in its own little corner. Everyone yaks about his back problems, his scandal (it’s been almost five years, people, move along) and whether this will be his big return to winning-form for one of the major championships.
He’s won 14 of them: four Masters, three U.S. Opens, three Open Championships and four PGA Championships. Starting in 1997 he has won close to one of them every year, but he hasn’t won any since 2008
The drought is due to a lot of reasons, some we do know and plenty we don’t. Tiger fanatics will tell you nothing is wrong, but everyone needs to admit he hasn’t been the same in a number of years.
We’ll wait patiently for Tiger to heal up for the U.S. Open in June. Hopefully he’ll explode and soar to his first major championship win in six years. We can hope.