By Jay Busbee
There are days when it's good to be Tiger Woods, and then there's today. Tiger turned in a weak opening round at the British Open, 1-over on a relatively easy day. At the time of his finish, he sat six strokes behind leader Tom Watson. Tiger could close that distance with his eyes closed, certainly, but the poor performance -- he was tied for 49th when he finished -- had to rankle him.
But then he compounded problems by giving perfunctory interviews and declining an opportunity to appear in a one-on-one interview with TNT's Jim Huber.
Weak move. It doesn't matter who you are or how badly you played, you need to step up and meet your post-round commitments. Shoot, Ryo Ishikawa did it, and the poor kid is still on training wheels when it comes to speaking English.
This has nothing to do with Tiger making the sports media's job easier; Tiger never says anything of substance in his interviews, and likely wouldn't have spilled his guts to TNT. That's not the issue. This has to do with the fans who want to see him -- Tiger is one of the two or three most popular athletes on the planet. It's also about the people who have invested millions in this tournament with the expectation that Tiger would hold up his end of the bargain by throwing a few minutes of cliche-ridden love their way. Would that have been so hard?
Now, let's take a moment to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he'd eaten some bad Scottish food. Perhaps the kids needed to be changed. But if he ducked the on-camera interview simply out of frustration with himself, well ... to put it in more British terms, that's simply not proper.
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