Taking a poke at Tiger Woods at this point is like picking low lying fruit. I am not even talking about the golfer here, either. As a human being he seems completely out of sorts and while I truly want to say who cares, somebody clearly does. During last week's highly entertaining PGA Championship the announcers could not stop playing amateur shrink with Woods. It was frankly embarrassing to hear the lengths they went to in order to keep Tiger relevant, something his golf game is no longer capable of.
Woods missed the cut by six strokes and finished 118th, tied with the likes of Raphael Jacquelin, Jamie Donaldson and Robert McClellan. Earlier in the week he was heard dismissively muttering after a press conference, 'That's why you guys listen and I play.' And what the media were subsequently listening to from Woods was the sounds of silence as he was nowhere to be found during weekend play.
The man has become nothing more than a sideshow - granted, an enormously distracting one that devours attention, but a sideshow nonetheless. If you like to think of yourself as a golf fan, then Tiger should mean little to you right now. He is not one of the world's best players, not even close. Of course, we all know what he used to be but I am far more intoxicated by the most intriguing collection of fearless and swashbuckling young players the game has ever seen.
Coming into the final major of the season we had already seen a 26-year-old from South Africa named Charl Schwartzel birdie the last four holes of the Masters to win his first green jacket. A few months later, Northern Ireland's 22-year-old Rory McIlroy shot 16 under par to blow away the field at the US Open while another wunderkind, Australia's 23-year-old Jason Day, finished second at both tournaments. As the PGA rolled around the big question should have been: Which other young star will emerge?
But the sideshow still needed to be milked so all the talk was not only about Tiger but his former caddie as well.
Steve Williams as a sympathetic victim is going to take some getting used to, at least in these quarters. The man who carried Tiger's bag for 13 of his 14 major championships did so in the most brusque and seemingly joyless way. Recently relieved of his duties by Woods, he fortuitously found himself on Adam Scott's bag just in time for that career underachiever to win his biggest title at the Bridgestone Championship one week before the PGA.
In all the years I have been watching golf I do not remember a caddie being interviewed after his man won a title. But Stevie has to be the most famous caddie ever. He's certainly the richest, so sticking a microphone in his face made sense to someone and he didn't disappoint.