Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

In a classic poem, William Blake, a 19th Century English poet wrote this famous stanza:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The poem was obviously written entirely in honor of a legendary creature found in the Asian jungles. It was an animal that inspired both awe and fear upon those who dared cross its path. Even today, it is an animal demanding and expecting respect, deep respect.

TO GOLF

In the context of the modern game of golf - a game originally designed to be exclusive to certain members of the English upper class - the name Tiger evokes similar responses. All because of a young man born on the last days of 1975 in Los Angeles, California. The baby boy, born of a black American soldier and a Thai woman, was originally named Tiger Eldrick Woods.

Tiger spent his childhood in a part of LA that I knew a lot about since I had gone to live there four months before he was born. Although I have no recollection of his birth or parentage, I somehow remember the evening after he was born as I and a few of my friends had gone to the beach at Santa Monica beach, California, to welcome the birth of the new year, i.e., 1976.

It was during that stay in the US that my interest in the game of golf was developed as I, a relatively green native from Kenya, started following the game on TV. Initially, just for fun until it hit me that there was something else in this game.

And that is how I became an inadvertent fan of a young man whose life I still follow up to this day. Of course, I had no clue then where Tiger Woods was headed.

FAST FORWARD

My real interest in Tiger started in earnest in the 1990s by which time he was already headed to stardom. It was also the time that I decided to start playing golf in a place called Arusha in northern Tanzania. Being an arm-chair golfer was no longer fun.

As a result, I took to writing about his meteoric rise and urging the younger members of my country - famous for producing long distance runners - to start playing golf. My articles were getting published in the Kenyan papers and got me into trouble on one or two occasions when I appeared to idolize Tiger Woods.

His ascendancy to greatness increased and it was obvious to me that he was destined to become the greatest golfer of all time.

TRAGEDY STRIKES

Then, in a truly Grecian tragedy way, all hell broke loose when, in 2009, his foibles finally caught up with him. He was 34 years old, married, rich and a celebrity in a country which idolizes even youthful excesses courtesy of Hollywood located, appropriately near where Tiger was born.

The rest of it is well known to all and sundry and I need not repeat it here.

By a strange coincidence, his fall from grace in December 2009 happened when I was passing through Bangkok on my way to Australia for my youngest son’s graduation. To say I was devastated, is to understate how injured I truly felt at the time. It was like a betrayal of the worst kind.

Remarkably, I did not hold it personally against the man but against a culture whose value system I have had a lot of problems with. And I expressed them in an article I wrote right here in Bangkok and sent it to my publisher in Nairobi. I harshly castigated many of his sponsors who had chosen to abandon him without mercy in his hour of need.

In concluding my piece, I still remember making my prophetic view of the prodigy - that just because he has had a misstep did not mean that Tiger Woods, the golfer, was done. He will be back some day, I wrote later, to reclaim his true greatness.

I am happy to have played a role in his comeback: by believing in him, in his power of resilience and, most of all, in his determination to never, ever, give up. It is a lesson for all young men and women of the world who carry with them dreams of their own greatness.

Well done, Tiger “Tont” Eldrick Woods.

JH Kimura, PhD,
Kenyan Visiting Bangkok,
24th September 2018

This piece was written in 2018 when Tiger won his 82nd Masers. I happened to have been in Bangkok but for a very different reason

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