Tiger Tribute Prompts Utterly Bizarre Backlash
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Tiger owns the color red.
He earned it by winning often and decisively.
No one in their right mind—other than Patrick Reed—dares to wear red and black on a Sunday.
It’s quite charming that his peers have essentially said no to the color out of deference to Tiger’s traditional power color expression inspired by his mom.
In light of this, few golfers travel with or wear red shirts.
So when Woods was seriously injured last Monday in a car wreck it was hardly a shock to learn players were not prepared for an impromptu salute during Sunday’s WGC final round. This somehow did not stop an unusually large number of lunatics from grousing on social media about players not partaking in the homage to Woods.
Last week’s winner, Max Homa, took particular grief for not violating his apparel and logo deals (see Tweets below). This, even though he spoke so beautifully of Tiger’s importance just a week ago when winning the Genesis Invitational hosted by Woods.
Collin Morikawa felt the need to explain why he was not in red and hopefully he’ll avoid the angry mob since his sponsor tried to get him somethign.
From Ryan Lavner at GolfChannel.com:
Tournament winner Collin Morikawa said that he had planned to wear a red shirt on Sunday, but that the shipment from Adidas got stuck in Memphis because of weather issues. His caddie even went to the distribution center to check if it had arrived. When it became clear that the shirts wouldn’t get here before his tee time, Morikawa instead settled for black pants.
“My agent said that even though the shirt wasn’t there, go out and play like Tiger would with the lead,” Morikawa said. “I think I did.”
Either way, the tribute went just fine Sunday supported by those who were able to get a red shirt from Nike even if the pattern screamed, the “red shirt Tiger said no f’ing way to.”
But more vital than any of this nonsense, Tiger saw the tribute from his room at Cedars Sinai and that’s really all that matters.
The PGA Tour put together this nice tribute of Tiger moments interspersed with players who wore red and black Sunday:
Phil Mickelson chose to go with a red shirt and kept his logo’d sweater on above it, explaining that he had to do a little shopping:
