Loading ...The Legend Grows
It wasn’t enough Tiger hadn’t played 18 holes since The Masters.
It wasn’t enough Tiger played well coming off knee surgery.
It wasn’t enough Tiger played through pain that caused him to double over during the tourney.
It wasn’t enough Tiger birdied the 18th on Sunday to force a playoff, then birdied the 18th on Monday to force sudden death, then won it on the first extra hole.
Nope, it wasn’t enough, because word came Wednesday Tiger will miss the rest of the season because he’s having reconstructive ACL surgery, and oh by the way, he was playing with a double stress fracture of his tibia caused by his rehabbing the left knee. Which makes what he did move from the impressive to the ridiculous, and joins the ranks of other impressive performances in the face of adversity:
-Jack Youngblood played the NFC Championship and Super Bowl in 1980 with a stress fracture in left leg
-Kirk Gibson hobbled to the plate with hamstring and knee injuries and hit the game-winning HR off Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series
-Michael Jordan shook off the flu to score 38 points and lead the Bulls past the Jazz in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals
-Willis Reed takes the court with a torn thigh muscle and makes his first two shots to lead the Knicks past the Lakers in the 1970 NBA Finals
-Curt Schilling pitched with an injured ankle that turned his sock bloody en route to beating the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS
-Kerri Strug completed her left vault with a badly injured left ankle as the U.S. won the gold medal in gymnastics at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
THERE IT IS!
I had to vote for Tiger today — while all of the other achievements are quite heroic, they were done in a single, same-day event. Tiger’s accomplishment was done playing in pain for 5 days and 91 holes. The kind of mental toughness it takes to force your broken body to produce that kind of championship caliber output for that length of time is just astounding.
– Shawn
I am not sure if it was heroic or stubborn or insane or stupid, but it was pretty amazing to observe Will this performance make him all the more intimidating in 2009-? Probably- and I wasnt sure that was even possible
Shun Fujimoto of Japan should also be included. In the ’76 Olympics he broke his kneecap in the floor exercises. The Japanese were in a dogfight w/the Soviets for the men’s gymnastics team gold so he decided to continue to compete w/o letting on about the injury thinking it would dispirit his teammates. His two remaining events were the pommel horse and the rings both of which put incredible stress on the knees because of the flying dismounts. Nevertheless he scored very high in both and the japanese won in the closest men’s gymnastic competition in Olympic history. The impact of Fujimoto’s ring dismount was so powerful that he dislocated the broken kneecap and tore several ligaments.
Jimmy Connors winning the U.S. Open while battling a persistant case of diarreah was also pretty remarkable.