Too Good To Be Bad

News Flash. It looks like Tiger Woods, the same guy who has been dismissed as being washed up by the half of the world’s golf fans who have been wanting to throw sand on him for years, and who has been canonized by the other half who has loved and hero worshipped him unconditionally, is contending again in a PGA Tour event. There are, in fact, rumblings that the “old” Tiger Woods might be back again. This is worth looking at. But first, for those of you who have been having that deflated feeling lately…

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Tom Brady looks like the guy who, no matter how dire the circumstances or what the situation, can flash a smile and diffuse any situation, simply because of his sparkling teeth. Like a game show host or a cartoon character, it is almost as if there is that same sparkling sound effect that you hear on TV when a cleaning solvent makes the floor crystal clean that goes off every time he flashes his smile. And because of that smile, you think, “this guy is too good of a guy to do something bad.”

Except Brady, who is the only player who has been on all four of the New England Patriot championships, has that side of him that people that are not a fan of the Pats, simply do not trust. Anyone who played for that franchise for the last 15 years would have that same thing thought about them, simply because they played for Belichick.

Brady was recently “convicted” of the underwhelming “crime” of allegedly telling the ball boys for the Patriots to, you know, deflate those balls a little bit, so he could get a better grip on them during games. Everyone raised a ruckus, the whole caper of “Deflategate” happened, the commissioner of the NFL ruled against all things New England, and the fallout for the affair has just hit home for Brady, whose punishment was upheld to be that he will have to miss his team’s first four games.

Brady reacted with NO smile, and NO sparkling teeth sound, and has proceeded to file a lawsuit (fronted by the NFL Player’s Association) against the NFL to make the suspension go away. The league, which has an infinite amount of money and a team full of its own high-powered lawyers, was hardly fazed, as they are now as much in the legal wrangling business as they are in the football playing business, and filed suit right back at them. Brady, the Super Bowl winning quarterback and golden boy of the league, has now turned into their legal adversary in court.

Here’s the thing, though. Brady and his lawyers have their arguments so far in the dispute framed in a way where both sides have claimed an exact, intractable side of the issue that makes it into a case where one side of the two has to be telling the truth and one has to be deliberately lying.

Is the NFL and its commissioner purposely lying to try to impugn the league’s championship team and star player? If so, why would a commissioner do that to harm his league? Wouldn’t a lie be found out? Wouldn’t a lie completely ruin a commissioner’s credibility? Isn’t it more likely that the commissioner is going by his investigator’s report and just doing what he thinks is the right thing for his league?

Is Brady completely telling the truth about absolutely, positively not doing ANYTHING to ever affect the deflating of footballs to gain any advantage? (New England HAS, of course, done some shady things, cough, cough Spygate, in the past to gain advantages on the field) If so, why would he destroy a cell phone with its text messages that would allegedly provide the proof of his innocence, just one day before the investigator requested it?

Isn’t it more likely that New England and its ball boys were just trying to get Brady an ideally inflated set of footballs (for Brady) and just got the pressures wrong by a pound or two? And the Patriots and Brady (stupidly) just tried stonewalling the issue, instead of just saying it was an “honest” mistake?

Whatever the case, Tom Brady is now the guy who is at the center of the storm. Is he the guy who is completely innocent and will win his case? Or, is he going to lose his court case and have to miss four games? Either way, he will flash that smile of his to everyone and will at least look like the man that looks like he is just too good of a guy to do anything bad.

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After two rounds of 68 and 66 at this week’s tour stop, Tiger Woods is eight under par, somewhere in the top five or so golfers on the leader board and just a couple of strokes out of first. The important thing is not that he is up there, it is that he shot the types of scores (68 and 66) that you HAVE to shoot to be amongst the leaders again. A PGA Tour course these days is too difficult to win with mediocre scores. There will always be someone (good enough) who is shooting low. You have to play well under par to win these days.

More important than his 66 was his 68, a round which he had started that out with three bogeys in his first four holes and the look of still another tournament where the struggling golfer would again fall apart. To come back from three over par early in a round to actually be three UNDER par is a real achievement on a tough course (this course once hosted a President’s Cup) and for a golfer who has been in the middle of a two year slump and who has been psychologically lost out there on the course. There are not very many touring pros that come back from such a horrible start as that which Woods
recovered from.

This is a sign that Tiger Woods could again be playing like a top ten golfer again. His problems lately have not been from the physical standpoint, as he appears to have recovered from his several pretty serious injuries to have mostly regained his health. His problems have been mental.

I still maintain that he has some physical limitations at age 40 now that he didn’t have at 20, mostly including a bad knee and a bad back (that at the current time, appear to not be causing any problems). Remember though (as most people in the world who have experienced them could attest), that bad backs can pop up at any time. For Tiger Woods to be successful this week and in future events in his career, he HAS to respect his back’s potential frailties. A true bad back does not just get handled by Advil. A really bad one simply won’t let you play golf (effectively, that’s for sure).

I also maintain that Tiger Woods sometimes is battling a condition that only the greatest of the greats has to deal with. He has the voice of the greatest golfer of all time (or second best behind Nicklaus, but that’s another debate) in his mind telling him what to do and how to do these things at a super-human level right in the middle of his golf swing that might be in contradiction to the current things that current Tiger or his current swing coach might be working on. In other words, the voice inside his head that Butch Harmon or Hank Haney taught him as he was becoming great might be telling him one thing, while the voice of his current coach might be telling him to do it another way. Who would you listen to?

The result is a body and mind set that tries to do one thing, but the opposite side of his brain tells him to do it differently and causes two competing golf thoughts to be going on in his head during the middle of his swing, with the
result being a dreaded double cross of a hook when you set out to fade it (or vice versa). He might be right there in the conversation as Greatest Of All Time, but NOBODY can play great golf with two competing and contradictory thoughts going on in his head at the same time and DURING their golf shot.

Either the old way of thinking must go away and be OUT of his head completely and allow the new line of thinking to be embraced, or the new way must be abandoned and allow him to do things the way he used to do them (and do them so successfully). In times of crisis, the body needs to know “which side of the brain” to listen to. Too often, Tiger Woods, the current golfer, has NOT been in control of where his ball was going, because Tiger Woods, the legendary golfer with 14 majors, has been trying to get him to play golf shots that MAYBE he can’t consistently play anymore.

But the main thing for Tiger Woods to take from his Thursday and Friday rounds is that he is still too talented of a golfer to be playing as badly as he had been playing, and that he appears on the road back to being a winning golfer again. He can again realize that he is simply too good to be bad.