Does this look like a man who is suffering much?
“Athlete” is becoming a very generalized term these days. If they revive Tiddly Winks os there is a competition in flicking guitar picks, will those people be Athletes too? I’ve played a few rounds of golf. Not my favorite thing, but I’ll acknowledge it takes skill, and that I’ve more appreciation for the game itself now than before I had played. It may be physical, but that hardly makes it an athletic feat to play golf.
Mr. Woods may very well have injured a disk somehow, but it’s more likely that a trauma happened on the driveway (or the bedroom) than on the golf course. Please, let’s get real about it, shall we? Just because he gets a hair cut or the band-aid falls off of an owie or boo-boo doesn’t mean they need to cut down trees and ink paper to tell the world about it. The guy has parleyed his game into fame and fortune, and I’m glad for him. But that doesn’t make him an athlete with an injury. It makes him a guy who plays golf for a living, and is getting some of the same aches and pains that everyone else on the planet suffers from. The difference is that most of us can’t afford to walk off of our job because of it.
Our society has money to pay him big bucks for hitting a ball, and for making and maintaining those artificial and ecologically damaging parks to play the game in, but no funds to take care of basics like… say, hunger, disease research, creating peaceful resolutions to conflicts, and developing practical alternative energy solutions. Tiger makes the news today, but there’s no mention of all the other things that are affecting the real world the rest of us live in. I’m beginning to think the media’s main purpose is to provide fantasies to distract us, rather than actually conveying real world information.
