The Devil Inside

Tiger Woods shot a 10-over-par 80 at the U.S. Open yesterday, and I wonder, not about the physical decline of an athlete so much as the loss of his pick-me-up.  Sex around the clock may have been the only way for Woods to achieve greatness in the first place.

Talent can be a weird thing.  Sometimes, it can be coaxed out through constant practice and competition; think Ted Williams. It was different with Woods.  Am I saying he needed to cheat on his wife in order to win?  Basically, yes.  Long story short, talent often comes attached with a big helping of crazy.

Consider Darryl Porter, a catcher whose best years with the Royals coincided with his alcohol and cocaine abuse.  Porter played another seven years after getting clean, but he wasn’t the same hitter.  The decline may have coincided with rehab, or not.  Also consider all those athletes who have lubricated themselves with liquor.  Why do something that could endanger your health?  The answer is that, for some players, a bottle makes for an excellent crutch.  You have to wonder about players like Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin even in that regard.

And how about Dock Ellis, the Pirates right hander who claimed to be on LSD when he no-hit the Padres and said he “never pitched a game in the major leagues [where] I wasn’t high”?   Yes, drug abuse could very well have kept Ellis from winning more than the 138 games he managed, but could he have stepped onto the mound sober?  We’ll never know.

What would I have done had my athlete of a child early on displayed signs of this kind of crazy?  Everything in my power to make her confront all doubts and anxieties head-on rather than turn to any of the above.  Tiger Woods may come to wish he had never found success the way he did.