An Experiment in Scotch

Watch­ing the final holes of the US Open plus the post play inter­views, I was struck by the dif­fer­ence in the Euro­peans who were inter­viewed and the Amer­i­cans, specif­i­cally the num­ber one player in the world, Tiger Woods. French­man Gre­gory Havret, in a con­so­la­tion inter­view, was gra­cious and per­son­able. He talked about play­ing well, about being let down by his put­ter in the clos­ing holes but mostly he just talked. He described his expe­ri­ence at Peb­ble Beach and his thoughts on the course as well as his play on it.

Graeme McDow­ell, the win­ner from North­ern Ire­land, was equally talk­a­tive, dis­cussing the course, thank­ing the greenskeeper and grounds crew and giv­ing us an insight into what it was like for him to win the US Open. He was per­son­able and friendly. Granted, he had just won the US Open but still, he treated the ques­tions from Bob Costas seri­ously. He appeared gen­uinely happy to answer questions.

Con­trast this all with Tiger Woods who answered a sin­gle inter­view ques­tion curtly and shortly, say­ing he would take noth­ing pos­i­tive out of his per­for­mance and act­ing gen­er­ally like a petu­lant child, not a man who just fin­ished tied for fourth in this country’s great­est cham­pi­onship in the sport of his choos­ing after a long and pro­tracted episode of mar­i­tal infi­delity and per­sonal dis­as­ter. He has appar­ently learned noth­ing, still assum­ing that hap­pi­ness only comes with a win. His inter­views were never par­tic­u­larly enjoy­able to lis­ten to but one would hope that he had gained some per­spec­tive over the past months. Instead, he can’t hardly be both­ered to honor the tra­di­tion of the cham­pi­onship, can say noth­ing good of the win­ner or poten­tial win­ners at that point and answers a sin­gle ques­tion as if it was the dumb­est thing he had ever heard.

I didn’t ever really have an opin­ion on his trou­bles over the past few months. I think he made a huge mis­take but I had hoped that maybe it would help him gain per­spec­tive on life, open up as a human and maybe give back to some of the fans who clearly still honor him. Instead, he is as stony and with­drawn as always. It is too bad that the best player in the world can’t be both­ered to honor and respect the tra­di­tion of the Open and its fans as well as his fel­low competitors.