Tiger, Tiger, Woods, Yo

When Tiger Woods announced last week that he would be coming back to golf at the Masters, I have to admit I didn't really get with the decision. Augusta National is not a course you want to play as your first event of the year. I thought with no warm-up tournament it would be really hard to play well and compete for the win. I still maintain that winning will be the best way for Woods to rehabilitate his image. But, then I saw the Tom Rinaldi interview last night and I realised something: Woods doesn't care about winning this one, he only wants to control as much of his comeback as he can. Last night's interview was all about trying to do as much damage-control as he could before his first round back. That's why he picked the Masters over some other warm-up tournament - the officials at Augusta National will help him control the media much more than any place else.

The Masters is an invitation-only course and if you break one of their rules they toss you out. Not for the day, not for the week, but for life. Golf fans hold the course in too high a regard to risk never being allowed back and any media getting tossed out may as well start covering another sport. They won't be giving press credentials to the TMZs of the world and have enough security that sneaking onto the course would be really hard. If those guys want to cover the Masters they can put up base camp a mile away in the same mall parking lot that the protesters and the Klan will be set up in. That's some fine company they will be sharing, to be sure. And they can forget about starting a sponsorship boycott to try and raise a stink about freedom of the press, because the Masters makes so much money that will just go on without commercials, like they did for the couple years when Martha Burke said she would raise hell about Augusta having no female members. The only thing that happened after that was people were happy about how few commercials there were and there are still no female members.

As for the actual interview I thought Rinaldi did a very good job last night, even though he was clearly on a time clock and had to rush to ask all his follow-up questions. He tried to get Woods to talk about his car crash and didn't lob too many softballs in his direction. I'm not sure how much this helped Woods, though. I admit seeing him confess he was nervous about how he would be received was kind of surprising and not something he would have talked about this time last year, but other than that it was still seemed like a set of pre-rehearsed answers. I have come around from my original position and now think that we have reached a point with Woods that he needs to stop doing these short, controlled interviews and just needs to go play. Honestly, if you're not going to acknowledge the questions that everyone wants the answers to, just repeating it's a private matter, then just shut up and go play. Let a string of birdies answer the questions for you.