AUSGUSTA, GA –It was a big week in sports, but there was no bigger story than Tiger Woods, y’all. Tiger fell down the mountain in spectacular fashion. But on Sunday, he completed his eleven-year odyssey back to the top. No athlete has ever gotten back to the pinnacle of their sport after falling so hard.
I was never a huge Tiger fan (or any golfer for that matter, I’m not a weirdo) and didn’t feel too badly for him. Sympathy doesn’t come easy for a zagillonaire with a carefully constructed, but fraudulent public image. It’s even harder when the fall was mostly self inflicted.
But who doesn’t love a good redemption story?
I don’t know if there’s ever been anything close in sports to Tiger’s rise from the ashes. And maybe there never will be. It would take something truly heroic to top it. Something like:
Roger Clemens comes out of retirement, passes every drug test and pitches two more successful seasons as a set-up man. His fast ball is gone, but he changes speeds, features an arsenal of junk, and tops out at 79 mpg. He cops to PED use and is admitted into the Hall of Fame.
Michael Vick throws seven TDs on his way to Super Bowl MVP for the Cleveland Browns. “The Dog Pound” in the Browns’ Stadium is renamed “The Dog Shelter” and the entire team donates their Super Bowl game checks to animal welfare.
Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan win Olympic gold as a pair, Blades of Glory style. The Iron Lotus is glorious and they make out on the podium.
Pete Rose is pardoned by MLB and returns to the league to manage the Reds. He goes full Costanza, doing the opposite of what the team’s analytics’ people tell him to do, and wins the World Series.
Aaron Hernandez leads a plucky band of misfit prisoners to victory against a pack of corrupt guards.
Lenny Dykstra is sent back in time to manage a Negro League team in the 1940s. He learns valuable life lessons about race. He returns to the present and apologizes to “Oil Can” Boyd for his comments before the infamous World Series game. Boyd apologizes for smoking cocaine before that game. Donald Trump sees a piece on Fox News about it. He’s so inspired he opens the border to Mexico. An asylum seeker from Guatemala is allowed in and is later admitted to MIT. He invents a machine to filter carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Climate change is not longer considered a problem by the end of Trump’s second term.
I’d better stop there. Come back tomorrow for Angry Ward, who thinks Jeff Gillooly was a patsy. Follow us on Twitter at @BenWhit8, @MeetTheMatts, @Matt_McCarthy00, Instagram @MeetTheMatts and like our Facebook page, Meet The Matts.
