But all that changed a year ago, and nowhere is the change more visibly apparent than in Dubai, where Woods had planned to build his first golf course. "Had" being the key word there. As The Guardian's Lawrence Donegan tells us, all is not right in Dubai for Mr. Woods:
Drive for a mile over the speed bumps, past an abandoned security hut, until Tarmac becomes gravel and then another mile until the gravel becomes sand, and there it is: The Tiger Woods Dubai. The first golf course in world designed by the man many consider, or at least considered, the greatest ever to play the game.
Read the three-year-old press releases and gasp at the numbers. Fifty-five million square feet. Two hundred "residences" – £7m villas, £10m mansions and "palaces". A boutique hotel, a spa and a Michelin-starred restaurant. And then the centrepiece: the Al Ruwaya Golf Club. Eleven thousand imported trees; 22m cubic meters of earth to be moved; and 3m square feet of water. An 18-hole masterpiece hewn from the sand. All hail the winner of "best golf development" at the 2008 Arabian Properties Awards. Estimated total cost on completion: $1.1 [billion].
Now gasp at the tumbleweed reality on the morning of 27 November 2010, the first anniversary of the car crash that led to the world's richest and most famous athlete falling to earth. The Tiger Woods Dubai: a dust-bowl, an empty car park, an "Arabian palace" as real as a Hollywood film set.
To be fair, The Tiger Woods Dubai plan fell victim to the same economic woes that sank most of the rest of Dubai, and even in Woods' boom times, it wasn't exactly on the fast track. Bob Smiley, author of "Follow The Roar," described taking almost the exact same trip in 2008, when Woods was still at the zenith of his popularity.
Even so, the urgency of a decision is now upon Woods and the developers. As Donegan notes, it takes a million gallons of water a month just to sustain the vegetation at the site. There is serious talk of just giving up and returning the site to nature.
Donegan uses the failed development as a metaphor, an example of how not even Woods could hold back the tides of economic woe. He suggests that just as it's probably time to cut ties with Dubai, it's time for Tiger to reconsider all elements of his life and his relationships ... including those that got him into this Dubai mess in the first place.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley may or may not have been a golfer, but he striped it right down the middle with "Ozymandias," a poem about a wrecked statue of King Ozymandias; its final lines just seem appropriate, somehow:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Devil Ball. We make you laugh, we make you furious, we even give you a little culture. That's a full-service golf blog, friends. And yes, you will be tested on this material.
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