What would you do?
Have you ever been in a tough situation where you are not quite sure if you should speak up and risk rocking the boat or stay silent and hope everything works out?
Maybe a situation at work where your boss asks who ate the last doughnut and you look away with frosting still stuck to the corner of your mouth?
Or maybe a situation in a relationship where a significant other asks if a certain outfit makes her look fat?
Those seem like they can be important moments where you have to make a critical decision on how you want to answer those questions without upsetting the delicate balance that is currently in place. Saying the wrong thing might quickly spiral the situation into chaos. So, what do you do?
Well what if I told you there was a situation like this that happened to someone very famous and it happened smack dab in the public's eye without them even knowing about it?
What am I talking about you might ask?
Let me tell you a little story about Tiger Woods...
Tiger Woods was playing in a golf tournament back in 2000. Back when he was beating the living snot out of every other golfer on the planet and winning just about every time he teed it up. This would be no different.
However this tournament is arguably the biggest tournament of the year (The U.S. Open), played at arguably the greatest venue in all of golf (Pebble Beach), and it's played against the toughest field in all of golf.
That's right, I am talking about the 2000 US Open at Pebble Beach.
Through 2 and 2/3rds rounds of golf, Tiger was absolutely dominating the field. The only thing that could slow him down would be the rain delay that happened 2/3rds of the way through his 3rd round. The delay would cause the field to have to go in for the afternoon and come out early the next day to resume their rounds.
Tiger decided since he had some extra time and couldn't really get out to the golf course figured he would do some putting in his hotel room that night to make sure he was sharp the next morning when his round resumed.
The next morning his 3rd round resumed and he continued his stellar play all the way up to the 18th hole, the final hole of his 3rd round. As he stepped on the tee he was leading by 12 shots, which if you do not follow golf is an avalanche of strokes considering most tournaments are decided by just a shot or two. At this point it was not a matter of "if" Tiger was going to win the US Open, it was a matter of "by how much" is he going to win by.
However, as he made his swing on the 18th tee box, he did something he hadn't done much of the entire tournament up until that point. He hit a wicked hook that sent his ball far left out into the middle of the ocean. Which meant he would have to take a 2 stroke penalty and re-hit from the same location. Normally that would not be a big deal, especially when you are winning by 12 strokes already. However, this would not be a normal situation...
After Tiger hit that shot out into the ocean he turned away in disgust, yelling as many profanities as he could think of in the moment. As he turned to his caddie, Steve Williams, and motioned for another ball, Steve strongly suggested that he hit his 2-iron instead of a driver, just to make sure he get this next ball in play. Tiger did not want to hear that and angrily grabbed the ball from Steve and went about hitting driver a second time.
This time his ball landed smack dab in the middle of the fairway some 330+ yards from the tee. It was a perfect drive. Tiger would go on to make a 6 on that hole (it was a par 5), and he would go on to play an outstanding 4th (final round) and win the entire tournament by 15 shots, by far the largest US Open margin of victory ever. He would finish at 13 under par, while the next closest score would finish at +3. It truly was one of the most dominating performances ever witnessed in professional golf and in all of professional sports.
So, what was so important about that tee shot on the 18th hole of his 3rd round?
Well unbeknownst to Tiger, that ball that he teed up was the last ball he had in his bag. Steve Williams discovered as much when he went to hand him that ball after his first one went out into the ocean. You see, the night before when Tiger was putting in his hotel room, he had forgotten to put those 3 golf balls back into his bag. That, combined with Tiger giving a ball away to a young fan earlier during that 3rd round left only 2 balls in his bag. Then when he hit that one out into the ocean on the 18th tee, that left one ball in his bag.
Why is that important?
Well, according to USGA regulations. A player must finish a round with the same brand and type of golf ball that he started the round with. If he runs out during the round he is able to obtain one from another player or outside source as long as it doesn't hold up play. If he is not able to do so, the player will be disqualified.
Since Tiger was playing a special brand of Nike golf balls at the time, it is highly unlikely that he would have been able to obtain one from any of his playing partners since none of them were playing that kind of golf ball. It was also unlikely that the golf shop would have any on hand at the time for him to purchase, and even if they did, it would have been unlikely that he could have obtained them without holding up play.
That means that if Tiger Woods had hit that second golf ball out into the ocean just like he did the one previously. He would have no more golf balls left to play with and he likely would have been disqualified from the tournament. A tournament that he was leading by 12 shots at the time and one in which he would go on to win by 15.
If that would have happened, we would have never witnessed perhaps the most dominating performance in modern golf and instead witnessed one of the most heart breaking defeats in the history of all of modern sports. Not to mention what might have happened to poor Stevie as it was his job to make sure there were golf balls in the bag!
What does all of this have to do with the questions at the beginning?
Well apparently Steve Williams discovered that Tiger only had the one ball left when he handed it to him. That is why he strongly encouraged Tiger to put the driver away and hit the 2-iron, that way he could keep the ball in play and then Steve would refill the bag with balls after the round. When Tiger decided he was going to hit that driver the second time, Steve had a split second to decide, "do I tell him this is our last ball and risk him getting nervous and hitting it out into the ocean, or do I not even tell him and just hope like hell he hits a good one?"
Williams chose the latter and decided not to put any pressure on his employer. All the while he was going over scenarios in his head of how he was going to have to find that young fan that Tiger had given the ball to earlier in the day and ask for it back so Tiger could complete his round.
Luckily for him and everyone involved, Tiger's second drive found the fairway and the rest is history. But, you have to wonder, what would have happened if Steve had told Tiger that was the last ball in his bag before he hit that drive? Would telling him the whole story up front caused a different outcome? Might one of the greatest feats in modern sports never have happened?
Maybe, maybe not.
What do you guys think? Did Steve Williams do the right thing? Are there any similar stories in your life where you faced a difficult situation where you had to chose between staying silent and speaking up?
Share in the comments section below.
Live well my friends!
Sources:
Image Sources:
http://eskipaper.com/thunderstorm-wallpaper-3.html#gal_post_69028_thunderstorm-wallpaper-3
http://gazettereview.com/2016/04/tiger-woods-net-worth-income/
http://www.albatrossclub.com/the-lodge-at-pebble-beach/
http://golf.about.com/od/majorchampionships/fl/2000-US-Open.htm
Follow: @jrcornel
Great story! The more you think about things the more conflicts like this can come up. I think he did the right thing but it is never clear.
When my dad was sick with cancer there was always the hope he would get better. So much of your recovery depends on your ability to 'stay in the game' and sometimes telling everything can change the outcome. Still though perhaps he would have had a better send off had we all made clear just how sick he was.
I'm sorry to hear about your father. That must have been awful for your family to go through. Something like sports seems so trivial and pales in comparison to that. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for your kind reply. You know we all get older - still though we miss the ones we love.
Yes we do. I am struggling with that myself as my parents are starting to get up there in age. All we can do is appreciate the time we have with loved ones, while we have it. Live well my friend! :)
Thank you my friend - you too! :)
Good story and a bit too long , but you have a minor point, It's nice you dug into it so much , I for one think he did the right thing so to speak , at that moment whatever you add will just be fuel to a fire and it might not end pretty :) , for that matter he go lucky too , both of them , hope Tiger is thankful :D
Haha yes they both did get lucky. It could have had a much different outcome! Sorry for the length, but thanks for reading!
Usually, I am the one who opens his mouth. But it is important to think first. Here, there was no reason to increase the stress. And Steve did the good job, in my opinion.
In everyday matter, I personally prefer to know all details. But this is me and people know me.
Good point. I think in most instances it is the right move to let all the details be known. Only on rare US Open defining moments might it be good to not share everything ;)
funny thing about that.... im kind of facing a situation like that now.
Personally, i would say that what Williams did was unethical. He hid information that was relevant to Tiger from tiger.
I suppose one could argue that doing so helped tiger in that it prevented him from becoming nervous because he was nearly out of golf balls. but OTOH, isn't remaining cool and collected during high pressure golf matches one of the things that Tiger is better at than anyone in the world?
It is certainly possible that tiger, in making the riskier shot, might have hooked the ball again. It was Tiger's perogative to weigh the risk against the potential rewards and come up with a strategy himself. Williams robbed him of that by acting deceitfully. What williams did was manipulation. He changed tigers decision by witholding critical facts from him.
Tiger might have decided to take the more conservative shot (and won by less if successful) or he might have tried the same shot, been more nervous and lost his ball. Or he might have taken the same shot and nailed it anyway despite being nervous.
IME, keeping important information from a person (or for that matter a group of people) is almost always a selfish decision, and the argument "its for his/their own good" is almost always a transparent rationalization.
Good points. Are you a golf fan @sigmajin?
no mainly a fan of transparency.
golf is more of a hobby.
Maybe a situation where you believe these long, trying-to-hard posts have overrun the platform and are, even if not intentionally, running it into the ground but downvoting them is unpopular because the are (presumably) "quality original work"?
I am flagging this as "disagreement on rewards".
In my subjective opinion this is not the type of content that will help steemit attract, retain, or grow a user base, nor will incentivizing it with high rewards do so. Fine if people want to post it but I see no value in highly rewarding it.
Ok @smooth, after thinking about our conversation a bit more, I will be posting shorter form, every-man type content all this week. I am not sure how my usual whale followers will like or not like it, but this will be your chance to see if having that kind of content on the trending page will encourage more of the like and help transform the platform. If it seems to catch on I will encourage my friends to post this kind of content as well. Here is the first one, feel free to trend it:
https://steemit.com/life/@jrcornel/the-next-tiger-woods
And remember we are all after the same goal, making Steemit great :)
What would be the type of content that'll attract, grow, and retain userbase? I'd like to know and try to fill the gap.
Is it something that new users coming to the platform can reasonably emulate, and have an expectation of success, or offers some other mode of participation that is open to them? (The proposed comment pool may shift things a bit, where posts like this are successful conversation starters and users can successful participate in the conversation; we'll see how that works out if and when it is implemented).
So, I would say social news, sharing experiences from everyday life, photos, etc. are all good. I would also include contests and games such as a the controversial Steemsports but also including the much less controversial photo and culinary contests. There are no doubt others that work well too, this is just off the top of my head. Along with somewhat lowered expectations of professional-level writing, editing, formatting, presentation, careful sourcing and citing of every image, etc. Long form essays on obscure highly philosophical and intellectual topics have an enormous barrier to entry, and are not in the category that drives user (not just reader) growth. Treating a social site that is (supposedly) trying to reach a large audience with many of the expectations of an academic journal or professional publication is suffocating, whether or not there are small minority of successful writers willing and able to function and deliver content in that manner.
That is not to say that these professional-quality posts are bad, and I tried to be clear above that I do not think it is a problem they get posted at all. The problem is that they attract a large portion of the votes (especially whale/guild votes) and rewards that may well be proportionate with their quality, but is wildly disproportionate to their value in growing and incentivizing growth of the platform.
Some of these other modes of contribution are frustrated by the UI and existing content expectations of the site, as we saw with trying to build TIL into such a participatory format. Over time perhaps that will evolve. For now I'm content to downvote a bit and scatter the rewards out to the four corners of the posting and commenting universe, including, very likely, a lot of casual and less professional posts (and comments too) that can't ever make it to trending under current voting practices.
I'm also happy to work with you on filling gaps, as we have in the past. So far what we have tried hasn't been very effective. Consider my voting here as another example of trying something. It also may or may not pan out.
Not sure why the Replies notification bubble hasn't been working on my side for a week now..
Hmm that's if most are looking up to other accounts / posts as examples. What about folks coming and just post up whatever they think would be best for both themselves and the network? That's the pull for Steemit for me anyway, I can just experiment and write whatever I want - but maybe that's just because I'm lucky to have built a following.
And I agree about the comment pool shifting things about, in fact I think the fat 38% is actually a good thing for other kinds of posts - like crowdsourcing for some solution or just plain working out together to achieve something that certain kinds of posts would command.
I'd agree with this sentiment as well, only because of the state of Steemit at its current form. Personally, I like to float between casual / dissertation type content, and not much of a photo-blogger. Perhaps it's unwise to keep getting longform contents up on trending often but it shouldn't be "punished", although again I agree anyone should have a say if they think a post is being overvalued and such. I think in this case, Steemit should have its UI/UX catering for both types of contents, delivered on-screen differently. ATM, each post is taking up quite a large space on-screen, and very short, social posts doesn't seem to click well with the current design, seeing that a clickthrough is required, unlike Instagram / FB updates which are just as-is on the screen. That's just my opinion on the matter.
On that note, I think a good, casual posting method for anyone to get involved in is external curation, like Newslink, TIL etc. With that I think a good format has to be established, and users should inject some short personal writing over something like Newslink. What's best is also to avoid titling it as Newslink or TIL, and just go for some more boutique-sounding title.
Will send you a message on Steemit.chat when time permits - thanks for the great response @smooth :)
there was some sort of weird change so that now if you have multiple tabs/windows open with steemit, your new notifications only show up on one of them
I've multiple open all the time.. but none will show in any of the tabs for the past few days (atm, it just came back up again..)
Instead of downvoting why dont you go out and find posts that match your definition of "quality" and upvote the heck out of them? How about trying some positive reinforcement instead of negative?
First of all voting power is limited and second of all I don't really support the idea that there are specific posts that need to be rewarded as much as many posts by many people that are being starved because of swarm voting on a relatively few favorites. The guilds help, to an extent, but it is an expensive and inefficient effort when it is swimming upstream against the tide of too much concentrated rewards on these posts. The solution has to be tailored to the problem, and in this case the problem is swarm voting turning what needs to be a broad phenomenon of rewarding more and more participants into a paycheck for a very small number of professional (at least on Steem/it, if not otherwise) writers.
If you're referring to me when you mention paycheck, that is humorous as I have yet to take a single cent out of a steemit, not one. On a side note, I have been very supportive of all your projects from steemsports, to short form posts, to your lotto idea both in the public forum and the private forums. Not to mention my tireless work on guilds and outreach programs. Thank you for returning that same good will.
'Paycheck' was clearly metaphorical. Earning stake still counts.
For sure I wish you no ill will. I like that you post. Is it such a bad thing that I want to see the rewards spread more broadly and less concentrated regularly on a few people like yourself who happen to be both popular with whales, getting them to Trending consistently, and excellent writers?
Its time to recognize that we need to cast the net more widely, if we want to catch a lot of fish (users).
I agree with that but what will the professional blogger say when he shows up with thousands of followers and sees many of the longer "more professional looking" posts getting downvoted by the community? Is that a place he wants to be?
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Jan 13. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $6.38 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 13 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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This is what amazes me. Little events have large consequences in the future. It's the butterfly effect and there are likely infinite ways our lives could have been shaped and our current life is just one of those possibilities.
Yep, everything we do and say matters ;)
cool photo, amazing, I love to see a sight like this
Thanks, check out the story too... it is an interesting one :)
Yes 👌👍
I feel so much better :-)
Thanks for reading!
A very cool story with details that I didn't know about!
When I was the youth choir director I purposely found music for my young singers that was well within their range but on the more difficult side. When my boss said, "That's too hard for them," I told him to keep a lid on it because the kids didn't know it was hard.
That is fantastic. Sometimes they need a little pushing to get better :)