I

THE DOMAIN OF THE SOUL

n retrospect, it was one of the finest moments in golf, perhaps in
all of sports. In June 2008, Tiger Woods birdied the final hole of
the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, just north of San Diego, to force an
eighteen-hole playoff. He took an early three-stroke lead but
surrendered it, only to come charging back, to birdie again and force
forty-six-year old Rocco Mediate into a head-to-head, sudden-death
round. On that 488-yard par-four, Tiger Woods would birdie a final
time to win his third U.S. Open and his fourteenth major. The second
most major victories in the history of the game.
And Woods was certainly the first person and likely the last golfer
in history to win such a roller-coaster match on a torn ACL and a leg
broken in two places. To call it a triumph of grit and determination
almost undersells Woods’s performance, because he did it with such
poise that no one watching even knew the extent of his injuries.
Woods himself knew only of the fractures, not the fact that his
knee joint was basically gone. Yet somehow, with nearly inhuman
mental and physical discipline, he transcended every limit the
complex and crushing game of golf had tried to place on him, and he
did it with little more than an occasional grimace.
We could call this moment the high-water mark of Tiger Woods’s
career. He took a six-month leave to recover from emergency knee
surgery. Not long after, his mistress, Rachel Uchitel, was caught at
his hotel in Australia, and suddenly the secrets of his personal life
were no longer secret.
When he was confronted by his wife, Tiger tried to lie his way out
of it, but the lies stopped working. Within minutes, Tiger was
sprawled out in a neighbor’s driveway, his SUV crashed into a nearby