Tiger Woods is facing a new reality, wherever he looks

4 years ago

It has been a long time since Tiger Woods heard … nothing.

Think of a Woods memory and it is accompanied by an explosion of noise from the gallery, and usually a ferocious fist pump. The craziness after the chip-in on 16. The victorious snarl after his first runaway Masters triumph. The first hole-in-one, on his Tour debut, in 1996. And, of course, when he prevailed at Augusta last year, when most thought he couldn’t.

Woods, along with everything else he has accomplished during one of the most extraordinary careers in sports history, brought big-time sound into elite golf. Stadium-sized crowds surrounding greens and lining fairways. Eruptions of cheering that reverberated around the course.

And so, when the 44-year-old returned to competitive action on Thursday, it was a noticeable change. Woods has kept himself sequestered away during the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, marked his comeback in the PGA Tour’s sixth week back.

It wasn’t a bad first day outing, a 1-under round of 71 that left him five off the pace. Woods followed that with a 4-over 76 on Friday, which put him at 3 over through the first two rounds and in danger of missing the cut. When asked about the lack of crowd noise, he acknowledged a noticeable difference.

“The energy wasn’t the same without the fans,” Woods told reporters. “That certainly was noticeable, mostly different. Certainly, it’s a different feel, one that’s a new reality, and we’re going to have to get used to it. I still felt the same eagerness, edginess, nerviness starting out, and it was good. It was a good feel. I haven’t felt this in a while.”

He hasn’t had that amount of peace and quiet for a while, either. Woods’ fame preceded him even in the amateur ranks. Big crowds followed him there, too, before he entered pro life with more hype than any player before him.

While every player in the Memorial field has to deal with the relative peace, let’s be real, the change is bound to be far more noticeable for Woods than for anyone else. He is the player who typically, even on the occasions when he was not contending, would be flocked with supporters and observers for every shot he hit.

“Woods, who uses the crowd to his advantage, has some adapting to do without fans,” wrote ESPN’s Mike Wells, from the Memorial. “There’s no doubt a roar would have been heard from a distance had spectators been in attendance when Woods rolled in a 9-foot putt for birdie on the first hole. Instead, there were a few cheers from a nearby yard.”

It is a small sample size so far, but how Woods reacts could provide a fascinating case study into how the biggest athletes in sports will cope with the silence that will greet them when they return to action.

LeBron James has played in front of sold out arenas for a long time, both throughout his NBA career and dating back to his high school days at St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio.

In the early days of the shutdown, James said he wouldn’t be keen to play without fans.

“What is the word ‘sport’ without ‘fan’?” James asked on a podcast with former teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye. “There’s no excitement. There’s no crying. There’s no joy. There’s no back-and-forth. That’s what also brings out the competitive side of the players.”

For NFL stars who played at major colleges, and especially those who came through high school hotbeds in the South, crowd presence has been an eternal part of their careers.

When many NFL games, as seems certain, are played without fans, it will be quite a shift.

While fans were not permitted at this week’s Memorial Tournament, several golfers, including Woods, did have a little help on Thursday. A few locals shouted out their well wishes from their backyards, including some children not old enough to remember the Tiger heyday. It was fun and cute and Woods politely thanked them for their support. A Tiger Roar it was not.

Woods is facing a new reality wherever he looks. This week, he played a practice round with Bryson DeChambeau, who is trying to revolutionize golf by transforming his body into a hulking mass of muscle and blasting drives of 400 yards and more. Woods, once the biggest hitter of all, is happy with a solid 300 nowadays.

A lot has changed in sports and a lot of things will be different when we are fully back to normal, whatever that means.

The NBA won’t have crowds and the NFL is looking that way, too. The best of the best will have to find their own energy to feed off. Perhaps it is part of the challenge, how you prove your worth.

Woods has never been one to back down from adversity and it is hard to imagine he would be minded to shirk this one.

On a bigger scale, perhaps that’s when we will know that life is somewhat back as we know it. When we don’t just see sports again, but when we hear them.

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