Strong stuff here from AP’s Jim Litke on Tiger Woods going into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
The best ones have the hardest time letting go. Woods wouldn’t be the first G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All-Time) to push the envelope.
“One day you might look up and see me playing the game at 50,” is how Michael Jordan ended his Hall of Fame induction speech. Knowing laughs erupted on every side of him.
“Oh don’t laugh,” he said. “Never say never.”
Woods can’t walk a golf course at the moment, so he eschewed empty boasts or self-deprecating jokes, and it’s hard to imagine he would show up at the first tee just for the sake of playing. But Jordan and Jack Nicklaus and even Muhammad Ali said almost the same thing and all of them came back in search of one more transcendent run, one more moment when they felt like the king of the world.
“I was never going to be denied,” Woods said around mid-speech Wednesday night, recalling the moment he’d inherited his father’s passion for the game. “I loved it. I had this burning desire to be able to express myself in this game of golf.”
A plaque isn’t going to change that.
