Sport - Sports : General

Tiger Woods chasing perfect season

— AFP

ALWAYS IMPROVING: What allows Tiger Woods to win, day after day, is his obsession to get better.

Every time he plays Tiger Woods reminds us why we watch sport. For the excellence. Everything else is secondary....cut of clothes, hairstyles, celebrity girlfriends, heft of entourages, size of paycheques, all the extraneous things that litter sports pages. That famous surrealist Salvador Dali once said: “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it”, but evidently he had not seen this golfer, whose deeds are often surreal, and who has pushed closer to the idea of perfection than most men.

Woods has been dissected, discussed, deified, and sometimes you think, enough, but he can’t be ignored, he won’t be ignored. Like all exceptional athletes, he has a sort of attention seeking disorder, a craver of the limelight. He has won all his three tournaments this year. Eight of his last nine going back into 2007. At last week’s world matchplay championship, he started with a comeback (three down with five holes left) and ended with an execution of Stewart Cink (eight up with seven holes left to play). He was through his play challenging us to look away. We didn’t. We can’t. One part of genius is that it is compelling.

Woods is imperfect, but those who search relentlessly for excellence find a measure of perfection some days. Greg Louganis earned a series of perfect 10s in diving, Torvill and Dean danced to perfect 6s at the Olympics in ice-skating, Nadia Comaneci tumbled to the first 10 in gymnastics. Yet it is intriguing that Comaneci recently told The New York Times: “During my routine and even after it, I did not think it was all that perfect.”

Always there is room to “improve”, and this word is the exceptional athlete’s hymn. What allows Tiger to win, day after day, is his obsession for getting better, his pleasure in getting better. Repeating one of sports’ self-evident truths, he said on Sunday: “You can always get better. You work hard on the short game, then you lose your long game. Work on your long game, then you don’t putt well. It’s just one of those things you always have to keep a handle on every single facet of the game. And a lot of times you just don’t feel like there’s enough time in the day for that because there’s so much that you have to do in order to improve.”

Always also an intensity must be maintained, a concentration lassoed and not let go, and this, too, is an imperfect business. On Sunday, Tiger addressed this, when asked what he does to work himself up. Said the golfer: “Whatever you can do just to be in it at that level that you know that you perform at your best. You’ve got to be at that energy level at all times. You can’t let it slip; you can’t let it get too high. I know where I need to be at, and it’s just a matter of being there.”

Tiger will never be perfect, at best he may hit a few perfect shots all year, a sort of flawless convergence of body and swing, of idea and execution. But when he is playing so commandingly, as he is now, he creates the illusion that he could at least have the perfect season. This is a perfection that is possible for athletes and teams, not so much a perfection of craft but an ability to be perfect in their winning. Brazil in 1970 qualified for and captured a World Cup by winning every match it contested.

Edwin Moses hurdled to 122 straight victories while in tennis Martina Navratilova came kissing close to perfection with a win-loss record of 86-1 in 1983.

In golf, it is absurd to even think of a year without losing, but Tiger’s skill is forcing us to contemplate the absurd. He has not endorsed the improbable, but he has not shrunk from it. Asked on Sunday, is it within reason that you could win every tournament this year, he replied: “That’s my intent. That’s why you play. If you don’t believe you can’t win an event, don’t show up.” He may not get there, but who dares not watch this chase for perfection.

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