Mike Dougherty's Blog

Karma El Tigre

As a former hacker-style golfer, I can honestly say that I enjoy watching golf on television. Those who haven’t played are usually the ones who say they are bored by watching “idiots chasing around a little white ball.”

I don’t watch a lot of golf — mostly the majors, with more emphasis on the Masters and U.S. Open.

Sunday’s telecast of the final round of the Masters at Augusta, Ga., was not as dramatic on a shot-by-shot basis as some have been in the past, but it certainly had plenty of human emotion on display.

Early in the week, attention was placed mostly on Tiger Woods’ return after a self-imposed five-month absence because of his infidelity to his wife and the ensuing line of mistresses who seemed to emerge from every shadow.

Thursday’s first-round coverage was about Woods and the sentimental favorite of 60-year-old Tom Watson, who was an early clubhouse leader.

Phil Mickelson emerged as a leader and Woods played well enough to stay close through the next two days. Lee Westwood K.J. Choi, Anthony Kim and some others were there, too, so anything could have happened. Primarily, though, it was the “Tiger and Phil Show.”

That combination hasn’t always meant a good result for Mickelson. The conventional memory is that Woods makes a charge and/or Mickelson chokes on a key shot. But Mickelson seems to have changed his outlook since he broke through after an 0-for-42 start in major tournaments.

Throw in Woods’ proving that he has human problems like everyone else and Sunday’s finish had a different feel. I’m not saying that many people wouldn’t have jumped on Woods’ bandwagon if he had won. They would have. But this tournament had a sense of poetic justice to it when we saw 2009 Masters champion Angel Cabrera help Mickelson put on the green jacket.

Whether it was because of Woods’ recent self-inflicted troubles and/or Mickelson’s experiences of comforting his wife, Amy, through her battle with breast cancer, we’ll never know. But there seemed to be a shift in allegiance throughout the tournament. It may have been temporary. Who knows about something like that? Though we all manage to be judgmental at times and we might say somebody “deserves” a particular fate, most of us don’t really mean it. Besides that, it’s not the way it works. Bad things happen to good people and vice versa. That is life.

Sometimes, though, events seem to work out the way we believe they should. For just a moment, it makes us feel better when it happens.