Eye Of The Tiger
They said he was a has-been. Washed up. Never to rise again. I remember the first time he won the Masters. It was 1997 and I won the office pool in a three-way-tie with two other girls because all the office golf experts had written Tiger Woods off, but he was our pick to win.
This past weekend he won the Tour Championship 21 years after that first Masters win and five years after his last professional victory.
The experts said it would never happen.
But the experts can be wrong.
Because the person who turns defeat into success isn’t the one who is watching. It’s the one in the arena.
As United States president Theodore Roosevelt once said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
We can’t listen to the naysayers. The ones who judge us and tell us it is impossible. We must put our nose to the grindstone and work every day to be better than we were yesterday. Only then, will success be in our grasp.
Only then can we sink that winning putt while the whole world watches.
