Tiger Woods may not be a hero for black people but he is a beacon for the aging

Tiger has never have been universally popular among African Americans but his match-up with Phil Mickelson offers relief from the burdens of age

On Friday Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will play for a winner-takes-all purse of $9m in Las Vegas. The biggest question isn’t which of these multimillionaires will triumph, but why anyone would care. The match-up has nothing to do with golf any more than Muhammad Ali’s 1976 fight with Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki had anything to do with boxing. Or, for that matter, my 1992 one-on-one matchup with Julius Irving had anything to do with basketball. Since these showbiz events don’t enhance or redefine sport in any way, there must be some kind of metaphoric value that justifies the millions of dollars they generate – a glitzy-yet-heartfelt theme we can all get behind.

My own match against Dr J 26 years ago – billed as the “Clash of the Legends” – wasn’t great basketball, but it wasn’t meant to be. Julius was 41 and I was 44, roughly the same ages as Woods and Mickelson are now. It was showbiz, giving fans what they wanted. We huffed and puffed and did our best, but we were clearly not the players we were in our prime. But so what? The fans wanted to see two middle-aged men work their asses off to prove that we still had the spark of greatness, if not the full-blown flames. We did just that. The score didn’t matter, nor who won. What mattered was that we showed we still had a few moves, a few flashes of glory.

As for Woods v Mickelson, this certainly isn’t a “great white hope” event that pits white against black to determine racial superiority. Given the political atmosphere created by golfer/White Nationalist-in-Chief Donald J Trump that has amped up racial tensions, one could understand if some mistook it for that. However, Woods and Mickelson are friendly toward each other and are jovially promoting this as nothing more than a high-noon duel between veteran pros. Plus, it’s golf. Not a whole lot of African Americans have racial pride invested in The Stroll Toward Another Far Away Hole (not exactly the dynamic ring of The Thrilla in Manilla).

African Americans have always had a mixed reaction to both golf and Woods. Despite the presence of municipal golf courses, which are meant to be more affordable, it still costs around $40 for 18 holes versus $0 for shooting hoops in the park. And if you want to play at the top courses, like Augusta National, annual fees can reach five or six figures. This may be why even a historically black school like Bethune-Cookman University has a nine-member men’s golf team with only two black players while the four-member women’s team has only one black player. This is 21 years after Woods destroyed the white ceiling by winning the Masters by 12 strokes. “I knew none of this meant, necessarily, things would change dramatically for minorities in golf,” Woods said years later about his historic victory. “I hoped my win would encourage them to play, or to chase their dreams whatever they were. But it would have been naive of me to think my win would mean the end of ‘the look’ when a person from any minority walked into some golf clubs, especially the game’s private clubs.”

Wendell Haskins, a former PGA senior director of diversity and multicultural initiatives as well as an associate with the NBA, describes the challenge black kids face who want to seriously pursue golf: “You have to have access to elite golf to play elite golf,” he told the Undefeated. “In basketball, let’s say you are a white player from the suburbs. You haven’t been battle-tested until you’ve gone into the inner city and played with some brothers. The same thing goes with golf in reverse. A lot of kids can play golf to an impressive level. But until you’ve played country club golf, under country club conditions, with country club kids, you have not played elite golf.” The numbers suggest that as Woods has declined as a force in golf, so has the number of black golfers. There were 1.5 million black golfers in America in 2007; 10 years later, there were only 800,000.

Then again, Woods hasn’t exactly endeared himself to the entire African American community. He’s never been an outspoken civil-rights beacon, famously describing himself as a “Cablinasian” (a mix of Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian). Some felt that was a sidestepping of his responsibility toward his black heritage. The racist truth is that in America, it doesn’t matter what the percentages of genetic ingredients are, if you have any black heritage you are treated as 100% black. That used to be the national law, now it’s just cultural legacy. Marginalized people need all the heroes they can get, so it irks some when someone of Woods’s international stature doesn’t step up.

Woods’s private life hasn’t established him as much of a role model either. He’s a troubled man who has waded neck-deep into the flotsam of fame. His arrest for driving under the influence of prescription drugs, his adultery, his messy divorce, and his proclaimed sex addiction have produced a lot of tongue-clucking and finger-wagging among African Americans who realize that, fair or not, the entire community gets judged by the public failures of its most famous members.

And yet, many of us are rooting for him now more than ever. More than a representative of race, he’s a symbol of the one thing we all grudgingly share: aging. His victory at the Tour Championship in September was a startling comeback after five without a tournament win. Mickelson also broke a five-year losing streak when he won the WGC-Mexico Championship in March. The theme of this showdown is perseverance in the face of the inevitable decline of athletic prowess.

Every year age jams another 10lbs weight into our backpacks, slowing us down and making us contemplate that time when we stop altogether. But Woods and Mickelson’s recent unexpected triumphs raised the spirits of all of us sagging under the weight of years. They inspire hope, the illusion of permanence, that no matter the age, we can always rally ourselves for one last challenge. I’m reminded of the end of Richard Wilbur’s poem, The Juggler, in which the audience explodes in applause for the title character who lightens their daily struggles:

For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world’s weight