THE HEART OF A CHAMPION

THE HEART OF A CHAMPION

From time to time, the world watches someone with a fighting heart bigger than anyone else. There have been many. Even Secretariat. When this triple crown winner died, the doctors in the autopsy room declared that his heart was almost twice the size of a similar sized horse. The "size" of the heart or the contents of it have a biblical meaning as well, "out of the abundance of your heart, your mouth speaks". How many times have you seen a champion speak bad of himself? Rarely, if ever. They always speak positive. If athletes do not perform well, I can tell you it is not because they quit "fighting" to do better.

Hungarian Olympic rapid fire pistol champion Karoly Takacs won the Olympic medal in back to back Olympics, the first time in 1948 in London, and the second time in Helsinki. If the story stops there, you wouldn't know the real feat. After the 1948 Olympics, Karoly had an accident that messed up his right hand, which was his shooting hand. So he went into self seclusion to practice with his left hand for the next four years, and came back and won in Helsinki shooting with his left hand! Heart of a Champion.

In golf, you have Ben Hogan. In January of 1949, driving in the fog going back to Texas after playing in California, a Greyhound bus going the opposite way, tried to pass in the heavy fog on a two-lane highway and hit Hogan's car head-on.

In those days cars were much heavier, never the less, the bus was forty times heavier than his 1948 Cadillac. When Ben all of a sudden saw the lights of the bus through the fog, his reaction was to throw himself to the right to protect his wife Valerie who traveled with him all the time. This move, ended up saving his life, as the steering wheel would have crushed him. But did not save the rest of his body. His left leg was practically destroyed, his pelvis broken.

Once in the hospital ("Hotel Dieu" in El Paso Texas), he underwent several operations. Three months in the hospital. Never mind that the doctors predicted that he would never play again, they didn't even think he could ever walk again. Hogan was already the winner of three major championships, two PGA Championships and an U.S. Open and several tournaments on tour. He was thirty seven years old and in the "late prime" of his golf career. What doctors did not measure was the size of his heart, not physical size, but the "size of the fight" in his heart. He fought to recover, he would challenge himself to walk to the corner of his block, then around it, then farther, and father, and farther... and he came back to play golf one year later, almost fourteen months to be exact. In 1950, he played his first tournament after the accident. The Los Angeles Open at Riviera Country Club. Tied for first and lost in the playoff against Sam Snead in the extra eighteen holes on Monday. Then, WON SIX MORE MAJORS between 1950 and 1953!

By the way, people should have known that Hogan was a "never quit person". He had tried the tour three times and gone broke three times before he started winning. During that time, he changed his swing from someone who "hooked" the ball, to someone who sliced the ball, something that it is far more difficult to do than people may think because you are fighting your natural tendencies. That, friends, is determination. Hogan was not a popular person with golf fans, he was very private and serious, and many people say, "rude". The time in the hospital, he confessed years later, made him reflect how he treated people and became much more open and accessible to others.

You probably know other similar stories of people with big hearts that fought back from injury or disease, or other obstacles, to come back and do whatever they did all over again, always against all odds.

Enter a man by the name of Tiger Woods. I have written before that this man was different than others. No one can even imagine how difficult it is to win three U.S. Amateurs in a row. In 1996, when he turned pro soon after his last U.S. Amateur win, I won a $100 bet with a "nay-sayer" who said, "I can't believe he turned pro before playing The Masters (since Tiger had qualified for the '97 Masters as the Amateur champion, he would no longer be invited to play in it as a pro until he met the required qualifications as a pro, which in those days was to win a tournament between the Masters of '96 and the Masters of '97). I told my friend that I sensed this kid was special. Yes, he was cocky and came out as "arrogant" to many, including me. But his WORDS were never negative about himself: "why play if you don't want to win?" He believed! And he achieved. He won three times before the '97 Masters and not only qualified for it, but he won it in record fashion. When I made the bet with my friend, he said, "now he'll know what is it like playing against the 'big boys'". I say, now the pros would know what is it like playing against a guy that ONLY plays to win!

From 1996 to now, Tiger slowly gained the respect as a player, and somewhat as a man. He did many things that made me upset that had nothing to do with his well publicized problems of 2009. He skipped tournaments that I thought he should play, he played in places that I thought he should skip, he said things that I thought he should not say, and kept quiet when I thought he should say something publicly. In that arena, I began seeing him differently when he publicly said that he respected the office of the President of the United States regardless of who was there, in support of President Trump back in 2016. Meanwhile, he has started a foundation that discriminated against no one and that has helped thousands, if not millions of kids.

Back to the game he plays. After his well publicized accident in California in 2021, he was in "self seclusion" for 13 months, and many speculated if he would even try to play again. Well, here he is. He turned a round that could have easily been a 76 or 77 into a very respectable 71. You have no idea what it took from his heart to do that. There is a long way to go. Will he win? Who knows, but he did win the first battle. The war (inside and out) is still going on.

If you are a knowledgeable golfer who observes how champions play, you could see that Tiger was "ALL IN" in his comeback to the limelight. What he did yesterday is nothing short of remarkable. Along with others, I will be cheering for him today, and if he makes the cut and contends, I will be cheering for him as well.

And I will always point to him as an example of what the Heart of a Champion can accomplish. The one that says, "never give up", whatever the circumstances are. Whether it is work, or something you are trying to achieve. Never allow others to tell you how to do your own thing. You are the only one who dictates how the future will look like as far as you are concerned. You don't have to like the man to recognize his achievements, you only have to learn that if you have determination, you can achieve more than people think.