We're serious people who believe in the unbelievable. We're rational people who wait for miracles. We're logical observers who think time can be turned back. We must be all these things for why else would anyone wake up this week to watch a rusty, balding parent, with a dodgy back and driving problems of all types, try and make another comeback?
We'd never expect Nicolas Tacher, world No. 1,198, to even be invited to this week's Hero World Challenge, but we expect Tiger Woods, the world No. 1,199 who returns to golf this week after 10 months out, to compete for a prize some time in the next six months. Of course, there's no pressure.
We see a photo of him on his Twitter feed, sitting there like a smug businessman in a dark grey jacket, and all we can think of is a red shirt. We're not the type to watch golfers hit out-of-competition shots on YouTube and yet more than 80,000 watched the 34-second video of his stinger last month.
We're crazy. No, he was crazy. He made his first hole-in-one at six. He shot 48 over nine holes when he was three. This is not a man, this is an effect and an addiction.
We perfectly understand that he's roughly a month from 42 and the best chance he has of winning may be on the Senior Tour in eight years. But a little voice still casually tells us that Davis Love III won the Wyndham Championships at 51 in 2015.
We appreciate that Woods' back has been more surgically corrected than some movie-star faces. But we can't help remember that he won the US Open with stress fractures in his leg. We accept that he's so out of practice that he's signed just one official scorecard in two years. But he's also the dude who won seven events in a row once. For every logical thought about Woods' feeble present there comes a defiant fact from the past.
We've noted that he hasn't won an event in four years and was so invisible that in the Results section on the PGA Tour website he doesn't even exist for the year 2016. But we're still so excited that of the 18 stories blurbed on the Golf Digest homepage on Monday, eight involved him - on his distance, body, equipment and how much money he's earned per shot in his career. At his peak, as the website https://noobnorm.com revealed, it was US$4,191 (S$5,642).
We know sport mourns and it moves on, from Zidane to Messi, Tendulkar to Kohli, Kobe to LeBron, Sampras to Federer. For everyone there is a replacement but not for him. He was that good? Yes. The PGA Tour player of 2017, Justin Thomas, missed six cuts this year; Woods didn't miss one for seven years. The further we get from his best days, the more absurd his deeds look.
We recognise that triumph in the Bahamas will simply be a no-wince, no-yip week, that right now he's an arthritic Mozart but, just wondering, did you hear that he occasionally outdrove Dustin Johnson last week? With Woods it's not the wider, plainer truth that golf clings to, but to such random slivers of hope.
This has become one of sports' strangest stories, of a man of self-generating brilliance and self-inflicted wounds, of grand summits and a great plummet, of hubris and humility, of fear evoked and now pity worn, a tale with no known ending because golfers never finish, they just slide down the rankings into oblivion.
Young people might wonder about this lingering connection to an ageing, inactive athlete, but no YouTube video can explain who he was, what it meant to be there, "live", bound to your TV, when you waited and he responded with shots of arcing genius and everything improbable no longer was.
I wonder if that's what people want now from him. Not a Major victory because it's too much, or dominance because it's too absurd, or even a Tour win, but simply a sublime shot here, or a singular putt there, just something to smile at and say, "Didyoubloodyseethat?" and turn away and think, "Oh, he's still got a little of it".
When it comes to Tiger Woods people believe in the unbelievable for a reason. Because he once showed it to us.
- To see how much top golfers earn per shot, go to https://noobnorm.com/golfers/
