Tiger Woods Never Did Get That Sorcerer

I remain convinced that the world of professional sports still fails to appreciate the power of practical magick, at least here in the United States. At soccer matches, especially in Africa, stories keep showing up about players making attempts to use magick against their opponents or predict the outcome of matches. The world of American sports, though, seems pretty much oblivious to all this aside from the well-known fact that professional athletes can be quite superstitious about things that in reality have little magical bearing on their performance.

The reason that magick has so much potential in the sporting world is simple - there is no such thing as a bad professional athlete. The number of people who can compete at that level is so tiny that anyone who can do it at all is going to be unbelievably good compared to just about anyone on the planet besides another professional player. The old saying goes that football is game of inches, but so is every other sport and the gap between success and failure is incredibly narrow. The manipulation of probabilities is tailor-made for such a situation, and exploiting that power can create the tiny, invisible edge that makes a good player great. Like Tiger Woods. Or at least the athlete that Tiger Woods used to be.

Watching Tiger was a fantasy. What would it be like to be so talented and successful and handsome and rich? What would it be like to have such a beautiful wife, to be so good that your bad shots go in, to be cracking up at jokes an hour before your tee time in the final round of a U.S. Open you're bound to win? And, short of being Tiger Woods his own self, what would it be like to be an insider to all of that? We could only guess.

All that seems like a long time ago. Tiger Woods is not playing in the U.S. Open this week. Do you care?

Awhile back I wrote about the "First Church of Tiger Woods," which disbanded following the news of Woods' extramarital affairs. After his loss at the 2010 Masters I made a prediction - large numbers of people praying for Tiger were previously giving him a paranormal advantage that he exploited to become the top golfer in the world, and without those prayers his performance had declined and would continue to do so. That prediction has proved correct, but nonetheless at the time I never would have guessed that following the collapse of his "Church" Woods would never win another major tournament.


So far that has indeed been the case. It's not the Woods isn't still a good player, he is. He would mop the floor with the best amateur golfer, even playing with injuries. But among the ranks of elite plyers his performance has effectively plummeted from what it once was.

The last time Tiger played in a tournament, at the Players Championship last month, he quit after nine holes and 42 strokes. Last week he announced, in a statement on his website, that injuries would keep him out of this week's U.S. Open. He is still rehabbing and recovering from what he has described as a "sprain" in his left medial collateral ligament and a "strain" on his left Achilles' tendon.

Of course, as usual, we don't really know what it's all about, but nobody's making any noise about the public's right to know. Once the Tiger Woods guessing game was fun. Now it's just annoying.

When your greatness is being powered by paranormal forces what happens to you when the power runs out? One look at Woods' fall offers a clear demonstration. The lucky breaks no longer go your way. The injuries you were able to shake off become more significant. And the quality of your overall play sinks from great to merely good. I hereby contend that the only way for Woods to get the magic back is to get the magick back - that is, if it's not already too late.

He's 35 now. He's divorced and living in a Florida waterfront fantasy house he couldn't possibly fill. His golf-course design projects are on hold. He and his longtime agent, Mark Steinberg, have recently left IMG, the only agency either of them has ever called home. Tiger no longer stars in his own commercials. Earl Woods, Tiger's confidante and putting mentor, died in 2006. Tiger's old friends, like Mark O'Meara and John Cook, talk about how little contact they have with him. Tiger's swing coach, Sean Foley, though an interesting theorist, is unproven on golf's grandest stages. A doctor who treated Tiger, Anthony Galea, is the subject of a federal drug investigation. When other players — Bubba Watson and Paul Azinger and John Daly — talk about Tiger now, there's no awe in their voices, but they're loaded with free advice.

The problem with aging and injuries is that even if Woods were somehow to restore his previous magical support system living without it has taken its toll, and it's hard to say whether bringing it back would result in the old Tiger returning to the green. Because of the difficulty involved I'm thinking that at this point getting back to that level of success would at the very least require an ace sorcerer rather than an untrained bunch of groupies beaming attention his way, and even then I don't know that the odds in Woods' favor would be particularly good.

Our fascination with Tiger Woods is fading not because, for a while there, he was leading a private life so at odds with his public one. It's fading because his Act II seems a lot like Act I, without the amazing golf. It's fading because you can no longer imagine an insider's club to join. People used to talk about Team Tiger. You never hear that anymore.

The takeaway from all this should be obvious to any magical practitioner. Once you get used to paranormal living normality is a serious letdown.