What Expats Can Learn from Tiger's Comeback

Tiger Woods has made a comeback. A propose a toast with my signature drink! For those ex-pats who are not golf fans or fans of the man personally, Woods is considered to be one of the all-time greatest golfers. Why you ask, well actually for a few reasons. He was ranked number one less than a year after he turned pro, and he stayed at that ranking from August 1999 to September 2004. Personally he went from being the darling of the circuit to being a naughty boy complete with a mismanaged personal life.

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Over the past few years he has struggled with back problems and had numerous surgeries to try to correct them. None of which were permanently successful. It became where the only time you thought about Tiger Woods was to wonder when his official retirement announcement was going to be announced.

And that was if you even thought about him at all. Woods had basically become a distant ghost, a great memory replaced by a combination of memories consisting of injuries and scandals and banished to the peripheries of a sport he had once dominated.

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He became a man with a body so injured that he struggled when he bent down to pick his ball up from the cup. We watched him struggle with drives, pitching and even putting.

During this time he was fearful of even sitting in a golf cart to watch others play the President’s Cup because even riding and a golf cart on smooth surfaces gave him so much pain.

All that was in stark contrast watching on Sunday at East Lake in Atlanta, when he was coming down the 18th fairway about to win the Tour Championship with hordes of faithful fans following in his wake, with him dressed in his traditional victory red of old, looking like our old memories of him as the indomitable player we once knew.

Understand there has been a gap of 1,876 days since his last win. He struggled to get out of bed unaided, hoping only to recover enough to be able to play normally with his kids. All the while Tiger never wanted anyone to feel sorry for him.

We watched a man who became trapped emotionally in a fading past and brought to the depths by the same physical activities that had taken him to the top of his game seemingly chasing something that looked like it was gone forever.

But now for the moment audiences are savoring a narrative of fall and redemption. It is hard not to be stirred by the implausibility of such a comeback, by a return that most doubted would ever happen.

So what does all this have in common with ex-pats? Well what caught my attention, more than his physical return to the game of golf, was that he seems to have come back to the game with a new and renewed attitude. When he was on top of his game he was a perfectionist, overly serious and stoic. Many of us can relate to this if were in some type of work that necessitated it, or in a position of authority or responsibility. Most think that this either comes with the territory or is a necessity for achievement.

In our so-called, “normal life”, or pre-retirement time we basically postponed a lot of our happiness and connections to ourselves and the people around us. And what many got in return was very similar to what Tiger Woods experienced. We ended up with physical challenges, financial challenges, or emotional ones. People in our lives changed, economies changed and our bodies changed over the years. What we once had, due to many reasons, had faded or disappeared and in it’s place a bleak future. So can us ex-pats also experience a comeback?

This golfers comeback was less about a tournament victory than what Tiger Woods won in trying to get back, which was a sense of who he is as a human being and what is most important about life. Can this be accomplished for us by moving to foreign land? Can we also become a new incarnation of ourselves? Someone who can have fun and laugh at ourselves? Can we become people who can nonchalantly tell stories about our past lives and even share a smile and a laugh while describing them? So my question to you is what will be your new incarnation? Let me know in the comments.

Let’s give a toast to Tiger Woods with my signature drink. You will not find this in any of the bar-tending manuals! Call this drink the “JC”! It’s delicious, refreshing and tropical. I hope you enjoy it. So here’s a toast to your comeback and to the future you deserve to have and to Tiger Woods for his incredible comeback.

Edited by Panda Sathaisong 🐼
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