Hank On Tiger: "I think it is just a question of how much is he going to practice, how hard is he going to work?"
/Hank Haney appeared via phone on Morning Drive and also on Chris DiMarco's SiriusXM radio show to talk about Tiger Woods' back surgery.
Besides wondering how much of a toll parachute jumping with the Navy Seals might have taken, Haney openly wondered how much drive Tiger has to go through the difficult rehab and to practice after so many years of grinding.That's a topic I also brought up on Morning Drive in talking about Tiger's predicament.
But Hank knows better and this is what Tiger will add to the pile propping up his Haney voodoo doll:
"He didn’t do anything from December through February this year and that was very unusual. And I think it is just a question of how much is he going to practice, how hard is he going to work? And then again, is he going to be able to? Is his body going to allow him to practice and work at it like he used to? And I think going forward that’s the biggest issue.”
Cameron Morfit psychoanalyzes Tiger's weightroom obsession and wonders if it was driven by celebrity status and some other stuff only Sigmund Freud could explain. However, Morfit tries and writes:
It made his Nike golf shirts fall just so over his shoulders. It allowed him to more fully leverage his fame with women, men and Fortune 500 companies. It gave him something to talk about with his jock friends Derek Jeter and Michael Jordan. Perhaps Woods simply enjoyed the exercise, as his friend and old Stanford teammate Notah Begay III asserted earlier this week. And Woods no doubt felt a kinship with his Vietnam veteran father Earl by training with the Navy SEALs.
But I keep coming back to the fame thing -- and Lohan and Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson and seemingly every child star you’ve ever heard of, including Woods. Something about all that unrelenting attention compels them to start altering their bodies and their minds or both, and they don’t know when to stop.
While we've seen some great examples of post-40 golfers succeeding in majors over the last decade (Singh, Mickelson, Cabrera), Jim Litke points out how Tiger's age works against him.
But he's been stuck at 14 since the 2008 U.S. Open, and suddenly it's relevant that he's playing a game that has knocked just about every other great champion off his pedestal by the mid-to-late 30s.
Woods certainly knows the litany: Bobby Jones retired at 28; Tom Watson and Byron Nelson never won another after 33; Arnold Palmer, 34; and Walter Hagen, 36. Gary Player won only one after 38 and Nick Faldo his last at 39. Ben Hogan was an outlier, winning into his early 40s.
Nicklaus, the one that always mattered most to Woods, won all but one of his by age 40, covering an 18-year span. And the last one, the 1986 Masters at age 46, was what people mean by the phrase, "catching lightning in a bottle."
Deadspin's Drew Magery says there's nothing new about Tiger Woods's camp "issuing a trite pile of sunny lies," and then pretty much confirms what many who've had the same back procedure will tell you: it's a long, complicated road to recovery.
I have had this exact same kind of surgery three times, and I can tell you that the last sentence in that paragraph is a blatant lie. Even though this is an outpatient procedure (I went home the day of all three of my procedures) and most people are up and moving immediately afterward, there are very obvious long-lasting effects. In a microdiscectomy, doctors remove a portion of the disc that's pressing against the nerve and causing pain, numbness, and discomfort. Once that piece of the disc is gone, the space between the vertebrae shrinks a bit and you are left with less cushioning than before. That's permanent. Long lasting, you might say.
More of the disc can leak out (and it usually does) because the bubble sealing it in has ruptured and can't be sewn back together. Scar tissue builds up. Certain muscles get strained because your body is trying to compensate for its new change in structure. Degenerative discs (like mine!) tend to degenerate further. Re-injury can be common, and certainly isn't 100 percent prevented by this procedure, ESPECIALLY when you play golf for a living.
Are you sitting down? Masters wagering in the Las Vegas casinos will be down 20% because of Tiger's WD, reports Bloomberg's Erik Matuszewski.
And Masters tickets apparently took a "dive" on the resale market on the news. Sunday badges went from $1252 to $1226 reports Pete Madden. I guess we all have different definitions of a dive.