After letting go Steve Williams, will Tiger Woods be able to resdicover his magic on the PGA Tour?
The question that comes up over and over regarding Tiger Woods is whether or not he's going to win again; whether he can ever make a run at Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 major championships.
It might be the wrong question. A better one might be: What happens if he doesn't?
The big news in golf this week isn't the RBC Canadian Open; it's that Woods sacked his long-time caddie Steve Williams after 12 years and 13 major championships.
It wasn't merely a case of a struggling golfer gutting a loyal employee. That happens all the time, and caddies will bolt too if the money is elsewhere.
But Williams had made like a faithful family pet during Woods' two-year detour into a personal and professional hell of his own making, waiting patiently for his boss to dominate the world of golf again.
And then boom, amid reports on Golfweek.com that Woods was displeased with Williams for caddying for Adam Scott during his convalescence, Williams was gone.
Thanks for patiently waiting to come out, Stevie.
"I feel like I wasted two years of my life," said Williams to Television New Zealand on Thursday.
But it was more than that.
Williams, the big, tough Kiwi who was as much Woods' big brother as his caddie, was a groomsman at Woods' wedding to Elin Nordegrin. Woods, whose ridiculous success on the golf course made Williams the richest sportsman in New Zealand, was a groomsman at Williams' wedding. Their wives were friends; their families close.
Outsiders -- and plausibly the wives in their lives -- presumed Williams an enabler when stories of Woods' carousing came out.
It was the awkwardness of that dynamic that encouraged Williams to suggest Woods would have to "earn his respect back," in the wake of his personal scandals of 2009 and 2010.
Williams went public with his disappointment in his Woods' behaviour in order to stake his ground. It was a risky move for an employee to make, but Williams was no ordinary employee. He was a friend.
But in the world according to Tiger Woods, the first loyalty is always to himself.
The first caddie Woods worked with at a Tour pro, Fluff Cowan, was fired for reportedly disclosing how much Woods was paying him. There have been agents and swing coaches who have been dismissed for stepping out of line.
And fair enough. It's his golf game and his career to manage as best as Woods saw fit. No one else was hitting shots for him.
Publicly Woods has always said the right things: "I feel confident we will remain friends," he said after firing Cowan. He was confident too that he and Hank Haney would remain friends even though an exasperated Haney quit working for Woods after six years of unquestioned devotion.
But Woods stopped returning his texts and emails after the 2010 Masters -- his first competition after he crashed into a fire hydrant and blew his world apart -- and Haney opted to break up before he got dumped himself.
Six years of working together (110 days a year) and accomplishing some of the most incredible feats of athletic greatness in sports history and here was how Haney summed up his relationship with Woods:
"I always felt like I knew Tiger from observing him. I did not feel like I knew him from knowing him," Haney told Golf Digest in 2010.
Would Williams say anything different today?
What's clear is that Woods is determined as ever to get back to being the player who ruled golf and perhaps all of sports for more than a decade.
Anything and anyone is fair game.
He'll fire his best friend. His family is already a casualty.
Woods is (was?) the most compelling athlete of his time because of his determination to win and his ability to win seemed one and the same: He wanted it and he got it.
It was fun to watch. It made things seem possible.
Chances are they will be possible again. Woods is an once-in-a-lifetime talent with a commitment and competitive will of a guy playing for his life.
Will Tiger Woods win again? I'd say yes.
The better question is what happens if he doesn't? What happens if the knee buckles again and again and he's a 40-something guy at the base of a mountain he'll never be able to scale.
Divorced. His best work behind him. Rich, certainly, but famous for all the wrong reasons.
Those may be hard times for a former child prodigy. Times like that you need a friend, someone to rely on.
You wonder who that person is going to be. It certainly won't be Steve Williams.
He had that job and Woods fired him.
