Tiger Woods: A different view

             We've seen professional athletes losing interest in their respective sports after a few years which often leads to them giving up the sport temporarily or permanently. Professional sport is a taxing job if the enjoyment factor is missing and it can often lead to physical and mental breakdown. What people often tend to forget is that the process of reaching the top is also extremely hard and requires a lot of dedication and mastering of your art. Keeping that in mind, one such example of a golfer comes to mind who reached the pinnacle of his sport and remained at the top pretty much unrivalled. 

              I will admit, I don't watch golf at all but if you browse through Youtube, you will come across some absolutely ridiculous videos of Tiger Woods right from when he was a child aged 2. If his father's words are to be believed, Tiger had his first golf club at the age of 1 and was winning under-10 competitions at the age of 3. He spent majority of his childhood and teenage playing golf, sometimes up to 12 hrs a day. Obviously, this was a recipe for success on the golf course and very quickly he reached the top of his sport and won everything there was to win in the sport. He felt like a king on and off the course, maybe thought that he could away with anything and everything. Throughout his successful years he had multiple affairs while being married which brought bad light on his persona. His marriage fell apart, he had to take a break from the sport and it resulted in mental and emotional breakdowns.

             This is not an isolated incident and it happens more often then one might think. It is very important to realise that there is an age and time to learn everything, and when you skip through life lessons, you tend to pay for it heavily down the line. Throughout his childhood, because he was so engrossed in golf all the time, maybe he did not have time to develop basic cognitive life skills such as communication, emotional understanding or even family values. Now I understand that he was a special talent and he had the opportunity to become the greatest ever but at the same time, it is very important that he matured into a good person as well. He hardly had any friends beyond the sport who could guide him through tough times and help him see the world for it was, without the glamour filter. Just maybe, if his father shared some life lessons along with the golfing lessons, things could've been different. This is not to say that you don't put in the extra miles and work hard, I just feel that the professional success of your life shouldn't come with complete sacrifice of your personal life. We need to realise that the phase from childhood to adulthood is a critical learning phase and those learnings tend to stick for life and therefore should never be avoided. After all professional sport stays with you for a limited period, but life lessons and understandings will serve you well throughout your lifetime.