Tiger Woods Was Mulling His Options On The Fringe Of The 11th Hole

As Tiger Woods was mulling his options on the fringe of the 11th hole early yesterday afternoon at TPC Boston, a 42-year-old golf fan from Maine named Glen Stimson, who was standing nearby, pressed up against the rope and posed a question to his son.

“Is he going to putt or chip?” said the pop, beginning his pop quiz.

“He’s going to chip,” said 7-year-old Ryan, who had as good a view as anyone as to what was taking place, given that he was hoisted on his dad’s shoulders, providing an unobstructed view of Tiger’s game.

What made this little scene so interesting is that Papa Stimson was using Tiger Woods as his personal telestrator while teaching the game to little Ryan. And surely there are various hand-wringers, sermonizers and Church Ladies out there who would say it’s wrong, just wrong, for a certified, board-approved, card-carrying Dad to take his son to Tiger Woods for lessons in anything other than pickup lines.

And so, as a struggling Tiger Woods staggered on to the next hole yesterday, and as the gallery moved right along with him, Mr. Stimson was asked if it conflicts him in any way, this business of bringing his little son all this way from Scarborough, Maine, to watch Tiger Woods play golf.

“He’s only beginning to follow golf,” said Stimson. “He’s not at the point yet where he can begin to understand what’s happened to Tiger.”

That said, though, Stimson quickly made it clear that Ryan has been following Tiger’s golf game.

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“From his perspective, what he realizes is that Tiger’s not as good as he was,” said Stimson, this being a clear understatement, given that Woods had to rally late to end the day with a 1-over-par 72, leaving him 9 strokes behind leaders Jason Day and Zach Johnson. “He’s not dominant as he was. And (Ryan) just wants to see Tiger get back to the point where he was in golf before. He doesn’t see the personal side of it, and what happened. He rooted for Tiger because he was the best player in the world.”

But what about life lessons and all that cool stuff?

“I try to separate that from the sport,” he said. “If you get into that, up and down, in all the sports, there are all these athletes who have problems. I’ve decided not to use sports to teach morals and values about life. I work really hard to keep all that between us, outside the sports arena.

“He has asked what’s happened to Tiger,” he said. “I say he’s made some mistakes, he’s apologized for his mistakes, and hopefully he’s learned from those mistakes.”

In another time, another place, Glen Stimson’s lesson to his son would be, could be, a lesson to us all. These are not the old days, when Madison Avenue taught little kids to finish their vegetables and drink all their milk if they wanted to be just like the Yankee Clipper and the Mick. No. We now pay athletes to be athletes, and if they happen also to dance, to tweet, to act, that’s OK too. We just aren’t so naive to assume they organize the church choir in their spare time.

The problem with Woods is that, these days, he makes sudden and shocking shifts between The Old Tiger and some weekend warrior playing the nine-hole muni course at Fresh Pond. He bogeyed four of his first six holes yesterday; by the time some measure of his game had returned, including consecutive birdies, he was buried on the leaderboard.

He did show some sense of humor after the round, saying, “I didn’t drive it very good, I didn’t putt good, I didn’t hit my irons good. Other than that, it was a pretty good day.”

Asked to explain his difficulties, he cut to the chase: “I just didn’t have it today . . . it was a bad day all around.”

What golf fans want from Tiger Woods is a return to the good days. As in good golf. They want to ooh and ahh and applaud; they want to be able to go tell their buds they just saw Tiger make a shot beyond the means of any other human. They appear to have made their peace with the man’s private life.

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Tags: Tiger Woods, TPC Boston