Michael Jordan Thinks Tiger Woods Needs To Close The Book On Trying To ‘Be Great Again’

A man can only be down for so long before people stop believing in his ability to come back. For the last five or six years, everyone thought Tiger Woods would become Tiger Woods again. In 2012 and 2013 he came close. He won 8 times over those two seasons and it seemed inevitable that he would win at least one more major. But then it all unraveled; his health, his ability to hit a basic chip shot, his coat of armor, all of it was suddenly gone.

In a recent column on ESPN, Wright Thompson details the downfall of Tiger Woods. He even interviewed Michael Jordan, and even his Airness — one of Tiger’s close-ish friends — doesn’t think Woods will ever rediscover what he once had.

Here are a few of Jordan’s heartbreaking quotes about Tiger in Thompson’s piece.

“The thing is, I love him so much that I can’t tell him ‘You’re not gonna be great again, ” Jordan said.

“I don’t know if he’s happy about that or sad about that,” Jordan told ESPN. “I think he’s tired. I think he really wishes he could retire, but he doesn’t know how to do it yet, and I don’t think he wants to leave it where it is right now. If he could win a major and walk away, he would, I think.”

“That bothers him more than anything … It looms. It’s in his mind. It’s a ship he can’t right and he’s never going to. What can you do? The thing is about T-Dub, he cannot erase. That’s what he really wants. He wants to erase the things that happened.”

If we’re to glean anything, anything at all, from these Michael Jordan quotes it’s that we could have been calling Tiger Woods T-Dub for the last 20 year. Oh, and that MJ thinks Tiger’s career is cooked. But more so the T-Dub thing.

In all seriousness, hopefully this is just MJ’s way of trying to motivate Tiger. After all, Jordan credits his whole career on being told he wasn’t good enough in high school. If it motivated for him to prove people wrong, maybe it will motivate Woods in the same way. Time will tell.

[H/T ESPN]