Tiger Woods and his son Charlie will tee off this Sunday in the featured match of the PNC Championship alongside Bernhard Langer and his son Jason. You couldn’t ask for more to bid farewell to the year. Knowing exactly what tournament this is, it could be Tiger’s first victory in five years, since the ZOZO Championship in 2019. But winning is a big word, even for the Woods, and that’s why, for now, despite sharing the lead with the Langers and the Singhs, it’s forbidden to use that verb.
It’s one of the three lessons that Tiger Woods is trying to drill into his son Charlie’s head lately: don’t count your chickens before they hatch, or even before skinning them. Anything can happen. Therefore, when asked yesterday about the possibility of lifting the trophy, the response was unanimous. “I hope to win this tournament some year, we’re there for tomorrow, but there are a lot of teams. There’s still a long way to go, and we’ll have to make a lot of birdies. I hope we can have a good start and then continue on the back nine,” said Tiger. To which Charlie added: “I don’t know what it would mean for me to win this tournament, first we’ll have to find out. When we get to that point, I’ll tell you how I feel.”
The first lesson is prudence and humility, without that meaning distrust. The second lesson is that victory should not become an obsession, something that Charlie himself acknowledged after the first round had affected him in recent months, specifically in last year’s PNC Championship and the US Junior Amateur. “It’s about focusing on my game. I was so focused on winning and how I was playing that the only thought in my head was how am I going to win, instead of how am I going to play the shot. It accumulated and caused two very, very bad rounds of golf in the US Junior. The same happened to me here last year, I focused too much on winning instead of everything else and having fun,” he explains.
The third and final lesson is about always having a positive outlook on what happens on the golf course, even when the result is very bad. Take something away, don’t leave empty-handed. In short, always try to move forward, even if it seems difficult. Therefore, when he finished the US Junior hitting 80 strokes both days with a total of -22, Charlie’s conclusion was simple: “live with what happens to you and learn.” To which Tiger, listening proudly to his son, concluded: “learn.” That’s all there is to it.
