Tiger Woods, scheduled to meet with the media Tuesday, rescheduled the press conference to Wednesday. Then late Tuesday night, cancelled it all together.
“After receiving daily treatment the last several days on his on-going back spasms, Tiger Woods has again been advised by doctors to limit all activities and will not hold a press conference Wednesday,” read a statement from the Genesis Open, the tournament Tiger is hosting this week in Los Angeles. “It will not be rescheduled.”
According to his agent, Mark Steinberg, this wasn’t done to avoid Tiger flying cross-country from his home in Florida. Steinberg told ESPN that Tiger did, in fact, fly to Los Angeles to take part in pre-tournament activities.
“This isn’t about him not doing a press conference,” Steinberg told ESPN. “What is going to be accomplished? What is he going to say? That he hopes his back spasms calm down?”
Well, if we’re looking at it realistically, what it accomplishes is Tiger gets to avoid any questions about the dreaded “R” word.
Just three weeks ago, Woods was here at Riviera Country Club, talking about the hope and excitement of getting back to playing competitive golf. He’d announced an aggressive schedule after two back surgeries sidelined him for 16 months. He’d play four tournaments in five weeks, including one in Dubai.
“I’ve sat out long enough here,” he said. “Got my body in a pretty good state where I feel I can handle that workload. But I still gotta go out there and do it.”
In the three weeks since, he’s played three rounds, missed one cut, withdrew from that tournament in Dubai (after one round) due to “back spasms” and announced he wouldn’t play in the other two events, including this one – his own.
So yeah, the questions he would face here would inevitably focus on his health, not on the work his foundation is doing around this tournament, as Steinberg suggested the emphasis should be in his spin job to ESPN.
And now, if we’re left to read between the lines, what are we to think?
For starters, Woods doesn’t want to talk about retirement, which is totally fair. There’s a high probability he’s considered it, considering there were moments, he’s said, when he couldn’t get out of bed without help.
This obviously isn’t the finish to his career he envisioned, and the guess here is that he’s determined not to let it be. He may be done winning majors in the eyes of everyone else, including Vegas, which has pegged him at 100-1 to win the Masters, but he truly believes that if he can stay healthy, he can still win.
“If my back feels good, I know I can prepare, I know I can play. I know how to shoot scores,” he said a few weeks ago. “But I need to have my health in a state where I can prepare to get my game ready to play at an elite level.”
That’s a big if, though, considering what’s transpired in the last few months. He was originally supposed to make his return to competitive golf in October, but pulled out because he didn’t feel his game was where it needed to be.
When he did make his return, at the Hero World Challenge in December, the biggest takeaway was that he finished all four rounds. This is now what amounts to an accomplishment for a guy who’s won 14 majors.
Since then, three competitive rounds and three withdrawals, four if you count Wednesday’s press conference.
Maybe he’s not ready to face the inevitable questions. Maybe his back pain is so bad he doesn’t want to make a public showing of it. Maybe he’s so determined to re-write the script that he sees them as pointless conjecture. And maybe, hopefully, he’s right.
But the questions are still going to come, with more force now that doctors’ advice to “limit all activities” includes a press conference.
If he’s not healthy enough to talk about playing, how can he actually play?
via Yahoo!Sports