Doc's TML: Tiger Woods is in the business of topping himself. Business is still booming.

Any golf round is a six-mile walk. What’s different about walking Augusta National is, it’s more of a hike. The one thing television can’t do, even now, is give viewers a sense of the changes in elevation. You have to be there to understand that.

If I didn’t worry about being tossed from the grounds for having a buzzing phone in my pocket, I could tell you this coming Wednesday the number of floors climbed from No. 1 tee to No.18 green. I’m thinking it’s like taking the steps to the top of the Carew Tower.

Anybody who has ever been to the Masters will say the hike surprised them as much as anything they saw. The course dips and rolls more than its notorious greens.

Tiger Woods is a 46-year-old man with half a dozen back surgeries, a few more knee surgeries and a right leg that doctors nearly removed 14 months ago. On Tuesday, he played 18 holes at Augusta National with his buddy Justin Thomas. The Masters begins a week from Thursday. Woods’ name is listed in the field. Presumably, the way he felt he handled the walk Tuesday will determine if he’ll play next week.

Woods is in the business of topping himself. Business is still booming.

Imagine trying to top Tiger Woods. How does one even conceive of that, let alone pull it off?

Michael Jordan had that quality. MJ topped himself. Who else, in any domain? FDR. He led us out of the Depression and won WW II. Jackie Robinson? Shohei Ohtani?

Mick Jagger is still seeking Satisfaction. Has he attained it to any greater degree in 2022 than he did in 1965?

We do understand that it’s close to miraculous that Woods walks without a limp, yeah? Woods on the 1st tee next week would be topped only by Woods winning a Jack-tying 6th green jacket a week from Sunday. Regardless, no jock ever has displayed more will than Woods.

Now, then. . .

HAS THE REDS KID PITCHING eased your mind about the destruction that littered the club’s offseason? Lodolo, Greene, Sanmartin: All good this month.

As it stands, the Reds will start the season with Mahle, Gutierrez and kids in the starting rotation. Even Gutierrez is a pup, having made his MLB debut last May 28 and owning all of 114 big-league innings.

Sanmartin has two career starts, both against the AAAA Pirates.

And the starting pitching could be the most hopeful part of this team.

You can trash Eugenio Suarez all you like but replacing him with Mike Moustakas likely won’t make the offense better. You take two all-stars from your outfield and replace them with Tommy Pham.

You take an already bad bullpen and remove Garrett, Givens and Lorenzen. That trio won’t be enshrined in Cooperstown. . . unless it’s competing with the collection of relievers currently filling the Reds bullpen. Your shortstop is your backup catcher. What?

OF COURSE DUKE WILL WIN the national championship next Monday night. No sport does theatre like the NCAA tournament. K is retiring. That’s really all we need to know. The Madness originates in central casting. So Duke beats Kansas at the buzzer, confetti litters Krzyzewski’s head, he cries a lot. One Shining Moment. Fade to black.

AS FOR SEAN MILLER. . . I was on vacation last week, so I missed his presser. It would have made for a good column, but not as good as a week of 80 and sunny. It would have been good if Miller had addressed head-on the elephant at center court, but I can understand why he didn’t. Time and place and all that. He said this instead:

“The matter at Arizona is separate from today here at Xavier. There will be a time, and I’m confident in saying that, that topic can be talked about. Just out of respect for the process, although it’s coming to an end, it’s not there yet. When that day and time comes, I look forward to sharing more. Right now, today is so much about returning here and certainly doing things the Xavier way.’’

OK, but. . . what’s the Xavier Way, and how does it differ from any other Way in college basketball?

Great program of vast importance to the university as a whole. Great new coach, back for a sequel, with lingering issues. Former coach fired while his team was still playing. Said coach did not break any rules we’re aware of, did not mistreat his players, had just won a game in the NIT. Bum-rushed out the side door.

That’s certainly a Way of doing things. The Xavier Way?

SPEAKING OF WILL SMITH, and everyone is. . . It is just me, I’m sure, but the Will-v-Chris middleweight championship of Hollywood and Vine barely registered on my usually long list of things to get worked up about. To me, it was sort of like taking sides in the baseball spat.

If a Lamborghini dents a Maserati in the Kroger parking lot, are we terribly concerned?

There are better ways to settle beefs than on stage in front of millions of people. And no, Smith wasn’t being chivalrous. As for Rock: Comedians are supposed to be funny. He wasn’t.

The whole movie industry is in this weird, post-COVID-19, streaming death spiral. As recently as a few years ago, my wife and I tried to see as many Best Picture-nominated movies as we could, before Oscars Night. This year, we saw two, each on TV: The Power of the Dog and Don’t Look Up. The former made me yawn, the latter was just silly.

Ever since The Wire debuted on HBO, movies-in-theatres have plunged to irrelevance, unless you can’t wait for the millionth Marvel bash-up.

I love going to the movies. The anticipation, the expectation. The dark cocoon of the theatre. Lately, there’s almost nothing worth seeing.

What say you?

My mood isn’t helped by the armies of self-indulgent, politically correct, self-conscious weirdos that populate the awards stage. Will Smith was a brilliant assemblage of all the stuff that makes me not watch.

IT’S GOOD THAT BUFFALO AND THE WHOLE STATE of New York is rich enough that its taxpayers can take on an $850 million burden, to build a new stadium for a football team owned by multi-billionaires.

The Pegula family, owners of the Buffalo Bills, have an estimated worth just south of $6 billion. The state ($600 mil) and the county ($250 mil) will pay dearly for the Bills new playpen. The state will also pay almost $7 million a year for 15 years in maintenance costs and contribute $6 million a year for the full 30 years to a capital improvement fund, according to Yahoo!.

It’s the most public money ever spent on a sports facility. At least for now.

Shameful or shameless? Or merely the cost of doing business in the NFL?

Next will be the shakedown of ticketholders, in the form of PSLs. Then the increase in ticket prices and the selling of all the best seats to people with lots of money. That’s the reward the commoners get for their loyalty.

Here’s NY Gov. Kathy Hochul on the deal:

"I went into these negotiations trying to answer three questions: How long can we keep the Bills in Buffalo, how can we make sure this project benefits the hard-working men and women of Western New York, and how can we get the best deal for taxpayers?" Hochul said in a statement. "I'm pleased that after months of negotiations, we've come out with the best answers possible: The Bills will stay in Buffalo for another 30 years, the project will create 10,000 union jobs, and New Yorkers can rest assured that their investment will be recouped by the economic activity the team generates."

A few things: Just another 30 years? 10,000 jobs? Investment recouped?

If you’re donating nearly $1 bil of public money to build a huge business, might you expect it to last more than a generation and a half? The 10K jobs are temporary, until construction is finished. Investments in stadia are never recouped. Their reward is in the intangibles they produce. And even when you’re done paying the upfront costs, you still have to pay to maintain a house somebody else owns, or at least benefits from financially.

I’m glad we have an NFL team here, and I was happy for the city this past season. The Bengals showed us why we spend ridiculous amounts of money to pad the coffers of folks who don’t need their coffers padded. Nothing uplifts a place like a championship NFL team. Especially small places such as Cincinnati and Buffalo.

But any objective observer would look at this and see madness.

Yeah?

TRIP REPORT. . . Late-winter trip to the palatial condo in the land of 75 and sunny:

There’s a reason we don’t often go to Florida in March. Everyone else does, too. If you go, pack patience. Understand you will wait: In traffic, at restaurants, in lines at the grocery store. The wait can be epic. For the nightly pleasure of sunset on Longboat Key last week, we’d spend an hour crawling on the Beach Road, to “drive’’ 8 miles.

Worth it? Hell, yeah.

The best trip involved no sun and no crowds. We made a day-trip to Micanopy, a tiny speck of old Florida two-plus hours up I-75, and from there a short hop to Cross Creek, former home of the writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. They filmed the movie Doc Hollywood in Micanopy, which looks the way it must have 75 years ago. Rawlings owned a sizeable cabin and ran a working farm while writing The Yearling in Cross Creek.

Very cool, if you like that sort of thing. And very nice to check out of the Florida swarm for a day.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . I never liked Starship as much as Airplane, probably because I’m an OG. But this is a fine tune, with a really nice guitar break.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Tiger Woods: Imagine trying to top another Masters comeback