It is officially time for all obnoxious ESPN SportsNation voters to punch themselves in the face for voting that Tiger Woods would in the 2009 Masters. In a nation wide ESPN poll, the question was asked, “Who will win the 2009 Masters: Tiger Woods or the Field?” How ridiculously absurd that 66% of fans picked Tiger wins to win. Are you freaking kidding me?

I have one statistic to cite to make my argument about why you always pick the field to win against Tiger Woods at a major. Woods has never ever in his “illustrious” career come back to win a major after trailing after 54 holes. Well if Tiger is so “clutch” then this feat should be simply routine for him. Well SportsNation, let me tell you that he is just not as clutch as you think. The media and uneducated golf fans glorify him for reasons unknown to me. They have made him the hero of golf so that everyone pays extra attention to him, when he is just not that much better than everyone else. In my opinion, Tiger does not usually win tournaments and majors, other players lose them. Now granted he does have spectacular performances sometimes that I can’t take anything away from, like back in the day at Pebble Beach, but that was back in the day. His so called glory days are over and is just as good as any other player on the tour now.

My hat is off to Angel Cabrera for winning the Masters and taking the spotlight off Woods and his unnecessary coverage. Cabrera is a consistent golf player who came up clutch when he needed to. I’m glad players like Kenny Perry and Chad Campbell were in the mix to because these are the real unsung greats of the PGA tour. I’m a fan who likes parody in sports and especially golf and I’m glad to see players other than the undeserving Tiger get some time in the limelight.

What really pisses me off about Tiger Woods is this injury he just dealt with. Not only do I have to hear about him all the time being such a great player, but if he doesn’t win the media uses it as an excuse for him. And if he wins then they all talk about how amazing his win was even with his prevailing injury. I could care less. Plenty of players play hurt all the time. When he plays a contact sport then we can talk about it. Last time I checked Brett Farve played over 200 straight games at quarterback in the NFL, so when Tiger does that then I’ll give him some credit.

All in all I’m simply ecstatic that I didn’t have to watch Tiger put on the green jacket. I hope that more people will educate themselves about golf and realize the fraud that Tiger Woods actually is. And just to clarify, I am not denying that he is one of the all time greats, he just gets more credit than he actually deserves, but that is all too cliché is this day in age in the sports world.

-Sam Gerb

Sam can be reached at sgerb@ut.edu