Churchless Tiger Woods Loses Masters

Back when news of Tiger Woods' numerous affairs first broke, I posted an article about the disbanding of the "First Church of Tiger Woods," an apparently serious religious organization dedicated to the worship of a guy who hits a ball with a stick really well.

I say "apparently serious" because while there's no evidence that the group's website was tongue-in-cheek, I have a hard time believing that anyone could be so stupid as to be involved in such a "church" - and bear in mind I was raised by football fanatics so I've had plenty of exposure to really dedicated sports fans over the course of my life.

While it was operational the Church proposed that its members perform prayers for Tiger Woods - that is, cast spells on his behalf. So as I commented in the original article, the public disbanding of the Church provided the perfect opportunity to start compiling data regarding those spells' effectiveness:

From a practical magical perspective this gives us a perfect situation for empirical research. If these people have really been praying for Tiger Woods all this time, could those prayers have been improving his golf game to paranormal levels? A public announcement like this gives us a clean before and after delineation for our experimental and control samples and golfing statistics are meticulously kept. So we'll be able to see if Woods continues to play as well over the course of the next couple of years without magical support and back up whatever conclusion emerges with hard data.

Our first data point is now in. Tiger Woods returned to golf last week for the Masters tournament and lost to longtime rival Phil Mickelson. NBC Sports commentator Mike Celizic writes:

I’m not saying Tiger is through. That would be absurd. He’s obviously a great golfer, but at the moment, he’s no longer clearly the greatest golfer on the planet.

That title would probably go to Phil Mickelson, who played as perfect a tournament as you could play, collecting his third green jacket in impressive fashion.

Lefty used to be the guy who would always find a way to blow a major. Now Tiger’s doing the things his biggest rival used to do in the big ones: the drive hooked or sliced into the woods, the missed two-footer, the skulled chip shot, the brain cramp at the critical moment.

Referring back to my original article, I noted that there is some empirical evidence that while the Church was in operation Woods' rivals played a little worse than usual against him in tournaments:

As evidence of a possible paranormal influence, take a look at this paper by Jennifer Brown of UC Berkeley. Her data shows that other elite golfers play worse when playing in tournaments with Woods. While Brown puts forth a psychological explanation for the phenomenon, this is also exactly the sort of data you would expect to see surrounding a player who is receiving magical assistance. If somebody casts a spell on you with the intent of enabling you to win some sort of game or contest, not only will you generally do better but your opponents will also do worse than usual.

If last week's Masters was any indication that effect appears to have vanished. Woods still looked good for the most part and finished fourth overall, which would be great for anyone other than the presumed "greatest golfer on the planet." Magick or no magick he's still an outstanding athlete and that's unlikely to change. It's interesting, though, that with the Church gone his remarkable luck seems to have returned to normal and Mickelson's game appears to have improved enough to beat him.

You can call it psychology, you can call it "mystique," but to this ritual magician the effects look just like those of a broken spell. Perhaps the disbanding of his Church has hurt Woods more than he knows.