Prostate Cancer

The elder Woods’s health has apparently taken a turn for the worse, and Tiger has indicated that he may forgo the Masters, which starts on Thursday, in order to remain at his father’s side in California.

For an athlete as single-minded as Woods, it is surely jarring to find golf suddenly, of necessity, thrust into the back seat.

But as golfers go, Woods’s experience is hardly out of the ordinary; life issues – ageing parents, faltering health, troubled marriages – tend to intrude on the golf world to a far greater extent than is the case in other major sports.

Indeed, Woods found himself paired during the first round of last month’s Players Championship with another golfer bitten hard by reality, Darren Clarke, whose wife Heather is battling breast cancer that has now spread to her liver and her bones.

(Woods commented afterwards that it was a fortuitous pairing and that he and Clarke spent much of the time commiserating and trying to lift each other’s spirits.)Padraig Harrington played in the shadow of a death sentence for ...

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