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I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.
I think the best thing is being able to play golf competitively for a living. Ever since I was a little boy, that's something I've always wanted to do, and now I get a chance to live out my dreams.
I have a big-picture outlook, I am willing to fall, and I understand it's ok to fall, but I am going to get back up, I may take a step back, but in the end, I am going to take a giant leap forward.
If you are given a chance to be a role model, I think you should always take it because you can influence a person's life in a positive light, and that's what I want to do. That's what it's all about.
I've been in some seriously bad places playing golf and it's just part of the game. You're going to hit bad shots, you're going to be in bad spots, and each course, when you learn it, you learn where not to go.
My body is a little bit sore from all of the practicing and playing and training, and your mind gets a little tired of it, too. It's nice to be able to recharge and come back fresh for the remainder of the year.
You have to look at the past in order to learn from it and move on. I've done a lot of reflecting over the past year. And certainly, I've turned the corner and am looking more toward the future in a lot of ways.
One of the things my dad kept instilling in me was the joy of the game. He made it fun for me. A lot of the time I see kids that don't enjoy being out there and that's a shame; you're supposed to enjoy the game.
I was living a life of a lie. And I was doing a lot of things, that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly.
There's nothing wrong with having your goals really high and trying to achieve them. That's the fun part. You may come up short. I've come up short on a lot on my goals, but it's always fun to try and achieve them.
One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people's expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.
There are golfers everywhere who may never get a chance to play a links course in Scotland, a tree-lined course in America or the sand belts of Australia. Hopefully I can bring some of those elements into their backyards.
I'm playing in the Masters. It's obviously very important to me, and I want to be there. I've worked a lot on my game and I'm looking forward to competing. I'm excited to get to Augusta and I appreciate everyone's support.
You ever go up to the tee and say, 'Don't hit it left, don't hit it right'? That's your conscious mind. My body knows how to play golf. I've trained it to do that. It's just a matter of keeping my conscious mind out of it.
For many my behavior has been a major disappointment, my behavior has caused considerable worry to my business partners, and everyone involved in my business, but most importantly to the young people we influence, I apologize.
Don't force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It's the child's desire to play that matters, not the parent's desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.
Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.
If money titles meant anything, I'd play more tournaments. The only thing that means a lot to me is winning. If I have more wins than anybody else and win more majors than anybody else in the same year, then it's been a good year.
As a child, the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive, to search and to take risks knowing that, if I failed, I could always come home to a family of love and support.
To be able to hold all four majors - the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open, PGA - all concurrently I think is the Grand Slam. But a lot of people have a different opinions on that. People think you have to win it in the same calendar year.
The key in shooting any good round is to give yourself some chances and, tomorrow, if my swinging is feeling any good, I'll have some chances. But, if it's not, then I'll have to give myself those 15- to 20-footers and hope I can make those.
I made my share of mistakes. People can look at that as what not to do, and if they choose to make fun of it, that's fine. I can't control that. All I know is that I can control myself. And at that point in my life, I wasn't even able to do that.
People don't understand that when I grew up, I was never the most talented. I was never the biggest. I was never the fastest. I certainly was never the strongest. The only thing I had was my work ethic, and that's been what has gotten me this far.
I owe a lot of people an apology. I hurt a lot of people. Not just my wife. My friends, my colleagues, the public, kids who looked up to me. There were a lot of people that thought I was a different person and my actions were not according to that.
You're going to make mistakes. The key is to learn from them as fast as possible and make changes as soon as you can. That's not always easy to do because ego and pride get in the way, but you have to put all that aside and look at the big picture.
It is technology. They all changed to a harder golf ball, so they gave up spinning on the greens. They all changed to longer drivers, bigger heads with hotter faces and lighter shafts. The problem is, the harder you hit it, the more control you lose.
I thoroughly enjoy getting away from the game and going out fishing because it's so relaxing, so quiet and peaceful. I mean, there's no noise other than nature - and it's so different from what I do in a tournament situation that it just eases my mind.
My mother's a Buddhist. In Buddhism, if you want to achieve enlightenment, you have to do it through meditation and self-improvement through the mind. That's something she's passed on to me: to be able to calm myself down and use my mind as my main asset.
I don't think you're ever there. You never arrive, but if you do, you might as well quit because you're already there. Can't get any better. And as players, if you ever have that moment - you should never have that moment. You're always trying to get better.
The key is to design great golf courses all around the world. But my plan is only to do a select few. I devote so much of my time to these. I'm kind of a hands-on kind of person. I always want to do the best that I can in all of my life and this is no different.
In retrospect, golf for me was an apparent attempt to emulate the person I looked up to more than anyone: my father. He was instrumental in helping me develop the drive to achieve, but his role, as well as my mother's, was one of support and guidance, not interference.
The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today. And that's how I look at my life. I will be a better golfer, I will be a better person, I will be a better father, I will be a better husband, I will be a better friend. That's the beauty of tomorrow.
I am pretty health-conscious, so when my girlfriend and/or I make dinner--no, I don't have a cook!--we choose the healthier options: lean meats, steamed veggies, fish, etc. Of course, there are always those cravings for the "bad foods" that I do give in to once in a while!
Well, you know, a lot of people look at the negative things, the things that they did wrong and - which I do. But I like to stress on the things I did right, because there are certain things that I like to look at from a positive standpoint that are just positive reinforcement.
Look at the NBA players back when Magic and Kareem played in the early 80's with the short shorts, look at what Michael looked like when he first came in the league compared to when he left. Every sport evolves. Every sport gets bigger and more athletic, and you have to keep up.
It's something you have to find from within. You have to keep pushing yourself from within. It's not about what other people think and what other people say. It's about what you want to accomplish and do you want to go out there and be prepared to beat everyone you play or face.
Look, there are no shortcuts in golf, and there are no shortcuts in life. You have to work for it. Dream big and keep your dreams for yourself. Because the dreams that you have are those things that separate you from others. If you give up your dream, you give up hope. And without hope, you are nothing.
It's ok to fail. Failing does not shape your personality; it's how you react upon your failure. Do you dust yourself off and mope or do you dust yourself off and come back stronger the next time? Eventually you will win. It may not happen the next time, it may take a little time but you will win in the end.
It's a never-ending struggle, which is great. You can always get better! You can never get there. It's a journey with no arrival. And that's the beauty of it -- that you can always become better the next day. It's pretty cool to think about it in that sense. Tomorrow I will be a better player than I was today.
St. Andrews by far is my favorite golf course in the world. It's where the game all started, it's why we have 18 holes instead of 22 and I think the history behind St. Andrews is amazing. There is no other golf course in the world that can say that every great player who has ever played the game has played that golf course.
If you're a baseball player and you're on the mound, you don't ever want to look up in the stands if somebody is yelling at you, because they know they've got you. You just keep your head down, keep moving along. Of course it annoys you, but you don't ever show that it annoys you. Just go ahead, move on, and keep on playing.
Courses that you've had success on, all of a sudden your game turns around because you feel comfortable on your tee shots, you feel comfortable going to the greens, you know, all the reads on the putts. It's a feeling that's hard to describe, but it's certainly one that you get filled up with confidence more than anything else.
Days when you just don't have it, you don't mail it in, you don't pack it in, you give it everything you've got. You grind it out, I don't care what kind of game you have, you somehow try and find a way to get it done ... That's part of my attitude and belief, that you should always have the switch on. You can't turn it on and off.
People thought it was asinine for me to change my swing after I won the Masters by 12 shots. ... Why would you want to change that? Well, I thought I could become better. If I play my best, I'm pretty tough to beat. I'd like to play my best more frequently, and that's the whole idea. That's why you make changes. I thought I could become more consistent.
I think, one thing that I've really come to appreciate about my parents as I've got older is you know, how wise they really were. As a kid when I was growing up, as any kid, you think you know every thing and I was no different to that. I had different opinions on a lot of different things then them but the way they raised me, in hindsight, they were right.
I've had moments where I didn't hit the ball very good coming in, and you've got to turn it around. That's the whole idea of practicing and really working on being focused on what I'm doing and being committed to what I'm doing. I know what the fix is and I've proven it to myself, and it's just a matter of going out there and executing it consistently over 72 holes.
It is pretty cool to have my own video game. As a kid, growing up, it was something I never even thought of. I thought about just trying to get the new game that was coming out, so that my buddies and I, we could all enjoy it together. When I was a kid, never once in my wildest dream - even when I turned pro- that was never something that I really thought about, having my own video game. Thanks to EA, it's a reality.