Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Why did Tiger choose the Masters?

Interesting to me that Tiger is choosing to come back and play the Masters instead of playing a tournament before that as a "warmup." We all know that in the past, Tiger has always made it clear that whenever he plays any tournament, he's playing it to win. But, I believe it's also true that he believes his best chance to win a major tournament requires being able to come into that tournament competition tested. For this reason, I have to question why he's not playing another tournament before the Masters.

My thoughts all along were that he would play the Bay Hill tournament, or what is commonly referred to as Arnie's tournament. I can't help but think that perhaps Palmer himself made it clear to Tiger he shouldn't play at his tournament as his first one back. On one hand, sure, there are people who would have loved to have seen him there. NBC for one, advertisers just interested in getting more viewers and certain segments of the media.

Some may even say Arnie would want him to play there. I'm not so sure. Tiger and Arnie have always seemed to have a good relationship, evidenced by Arnie's warm congratulations each time Tiger walked off the 72nd green as winner at Bay Hill. However, I thought it was notable that at no time during Tiger's exile from golf did we hear from Palmer. At least I don't remember hearing his thoughts. This always made me wonder if his true, honest thoughts about the situation would have been less than flattering for Tiger, e.g. he was disappointed in his personal lifestyle choices. I also wonder if, when Tiger started making plans to play, he initially planned on playing Bay Hill like he always had, but then Arnie gently persuaded him not to play. His tournament will have plenty of attention anyway, and Arnie probably wanted to avoid all the extra media attention. If Tiger would have played, I imagine the tournament host would have had to answer a ton of questions about Tiger. Seems a pretty logical conclusion to me that behind the scenes, Arnold Palmer could very well have let Tiger know he'd prefer he didn't play his tournament just this one time.