Meta Tiger

Nixon's moron at the Times, William Safire, wrote perhaps the single stupidest hebetude I've ever seen. Responding to someone's metaphor of "quantum change," Safire looked it up, didn't bother to understand, and responded that quantum distances were very small. So, if a total change of state, occurs at a nanometer, we don't have to notice it.

Guy plays golf, shoots 106, gets a handicap of 34, shoots 99, gets a handicap reduction. The scratch players get no handicap: or aren't allowed to claim them in a PGA tournament. But seedings take over in a way: who gets to play at all, who gets to play last ... Somebody wins the tournament. Good. That's what the tournament was for: to declare a winner.

But there are tournaments next month too! next week, all over. a choice of tournaments, in countries around the world. For some time now there have been sort-out-the-champions tournaments: the British Open for one, the Masters for another. The next thing we know, to be champ, you have to have won not only multiple tournaments, but multiple Major tournaments. Thus, for the longest time, the only real champion was Bobby Jones; until there was also Jack Nicklaus.

Now there's Tiger Woods. Now there's been Tiger Woods for a decade, actually, for thirty years. But something else just happened. Not only did Tiger Woods just win the PGA title, again, for the third time, not only had he just won his two previous tournaments, including, ha!, the British Open, for a fourth time, not only did this record and that record and the other record fall, but something else happened too: Tiger moved into a new golf category. Not just the best golfer this week, in this tournament, not just the best PGA player, not just the greatest golfer of all time ... He'd been all of those things already, except for measurements involving a whole career, and you can't have that while the career is on-going. No, Tiger's accomplishment set up a whole new meta-category, for golfers anyway. It's a category previously known only to a very few: Achilles, Ruth, Ali ... Tiger is now everywhere understood to be the bestBestBEST...

The next step would transcend sport. Tiger would be with Jesus.

PS Mike Wilbon posted a related piece at MSNBC, but I wanted to relate parallel observations to a meta series.