The announcements came 24 hours apart, and while differing in gravity both served to illustrate the narrowing focus of legends in their waning years.
On Thursday, 38-year-old Roger Federer revealed he’d had knee surgery and would be out until the summer grass court season. A day later, his old Gillette commercials co-star, 44-year-old Tiger Woods, said he’s skipping this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational owing to a rusty back. Both decisions were made with an eye on the prizes that matter most: Wimbledon for Federer, the Masters for Woods.
While Federer will miss one major — the annual Rafa Nadal coronation formerly known as the French Open — Woods won’t, but the paring of his schedule bodes ill for an event that could use the energy injection he provides: Olympic golf. The top 15 in the world ranking qualify for the Games in Tokyo. Woods is currently No. 10, but a maximum of four golfers are allowed from each nation and there are five Americans ahead of him, raising the specter that he’ll be out in the cold in the race for gold.
This of course assumes the Games proceed unfettered by the fallout from coronavirus, which is far from certain. I asked the vice president of the International Golf Federation, Ty Votaw, about fears the Olympics might be cancelled. “As far as the IGF is concerned, we are committed to doing everything we can to ensure successful men’s and women’s golf competitions in the 2020 Tokyo Games,” came his commendably upbeat and characteristically tenebrous reply.
The Games won’t need Woods to be successful, but Olympic golf would undeniably benefit from his presence. If nothing else, Woods competing would go some way to erasing the air of apathy that attended golf’s return in Rio four summers ago, when many players stayed home, ostensibly for fear of the Zika virus. But even Woods can’t alter the reality of where gold for golf ranks.
An Olympic gold medal ought to be the pinnacle of achievement in a sport, and in most it is. But in golf, as in tennis, that gold might rank (at best) fifth among the prizes competitors most want to own, lower if you consider the Players Championship and FedEx Cup. Brooks Koepka admitted as much last month. ”To me, the four majors are definitely more important, and the FedEx Cup, too, is a goal of mine,” he said. “We’ll see where everything else falls.”
Olympic athletes don’t usually say offhandedly that they’ll see where the Games fall in the list of priorities. But then, Olympians wait four years for the podium while golfers have four a year.
The ripple effects of Woods’ increasingly limited schedule extend beyond disappointed fans at Bay Hill and perhaps Tokyo. He said last month that his goal is to play roughly a dozen events a year, which wouldn’t recommend him for the prospective Premier Golf League splinter circuit. The CEO of the League has acknowledged there isn’t much wiggle room for golfers to play fewer than the 18 proposed but non-existent tournaments on the proposed but non-existent tour. And lengthy flights to fulfill such an extensive global schedule won’t much appeal to Woods either, even if he’s not flying in the arse end of a commercial airliner.
Tiger’s decision to skip Bay Hill for the second straight year is not conclusively cause for concern — he missed 2019 with a neck strain but that didn’t hamper him at Augusta National a month later — but nor is it grounds for optimism if he’s too physically compromised to play a flat golf course on which he has won eight times. It’s simply a sign of the new reality we must live with — that Woods’ appearances on the PGA Tour will, like papal audiences, be much sought after and highly anticipated, but sparingly granted.
What remains of Woods’ career, like that of Federer, is now about prioritizing. If he doesn’t qualify for Tokyo, that would in truth be a minor blip for the Games of the XXXII Olympiad. His absence from one of golf’s major championships would be much more impactful. So if the feast Woods provides must be rationed, then let golf fans eat and the Games go hungry.
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