"After a lot of soul searching and
honest reflection, I know that I am not yet ready to play on the PGA
Tour or compete in Turkey," former world No. 1 Woods said in a statement
on his website.
"My health is
good, and I feel strong, but my game is vulnerable and not where it
needs to be. When I announced last week I was going to Safeway, I had
every intention of playing, or I wouldn't have committed."
After announcing last week he would make his comeback at the Safeway
Open this Thursday, Woods revealed Monday that he is pulling out of the
PGA Tour tournament in California and next month's Turkish
"I spent a week with the US Ryder Cup
Team, an honor and experience that inspired me even more to play," said
Woods, who had been due to play alongside two-time NBA MV Steph Curry at a golf pro-am in Napa on Wednesday.
"I
practiced the last several days in California, but after a lot of
hours, I knew I wasn't ready to compete against the best golfers in the
world.
"This isn't what I wanted to
happen, but I will continue to strive to be able to play tournament
golf. I'm close, and I won't stop until I get there."
The 40-year-old has not won a PGA Tour event since the World Golf
Championships-Bridgestone Invitational in August 2013, but is striving
to add to his total of 79 titles and close in on Sam Snead's all-time
record of 82.
I
remember the first time I consciously went to King's Cross, on the
northeastern edge of central London, and by "consciously," I mean in the
first sweaty bloom of swaggering adolescence, up for life and mouth
wide open to suck up the big city.
My
friend John and I had traveled in by Tube from our natal homes in the
north London 'burbs; we had £9 in cash between us and we were wired on
amphetamine "blues"-- speed pills that, at four for £1, were
attractively priced for teenaged punk rockers in the late 1970s. We were
en route to Jock's Tattoo Parlour, and perhaps this fact alone -- that
we had to journey across town to be inkily inscribed -- serves to
separate that era from this one, when no gentrifying London neighborhood
is complete without its own
body-modification salon and most of the
city's inhabitants resemble Maori warriors going into battle.
Jock's
was a malodorous little nook on the scabrous section of the Pentonville
Road that runs east from King's Cross station. I say "runs," because
whatever the evolutionary end point of the massive redevelopment
currently under way in King's Cross, I doubt the thick miasma of
debauchery and desuetude that hangs over this dingy dell will ever be
dispelled.
In
1977 the road was dominated by the strange Victorian turret of the
Lighthouse Building and the Scala Cinema's lone cupola -- both
structures that remain in place today. John and I breasted the crowds of
office workers, warily eyed skulking prostitutes and drug dealers, then
dived into Jock's and stood there, quaking, in the gloomy
cigarette-stunk interior.
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