Tiger Woods, Death, Arnold, and the Zone

This excerpt is from an article about Tiger Woods coming back to golf after his father’s death. He’s talking about how hard it was to even practice again because a lot of the memories he has of his recently deceased father are intertwined with golf. He says, though, that he’s looking forward to competing:

"I'm so focused on what I need to do," Woods said. "Everything else kind of goes away. That's something I'm really looking forward to."

It reminds me of something Arnold Schwarzenegger once said in Pumping Iron about how zeroed in he got before competitions. He told the story of his mother calling him right before he was to compete in a bodybuilding competition to tell him his father, who he loved very much, was dead. He says he just said “OK” and “Yes,” telling his mother that there was nothing he could do. She was shocked. Then he went to compete. It didn’t hit him until after how callous he had been, but that it’s part of what a great athlete does in order to perform—in order to be that good they have to go into a zone where no one can touch them, not even the death of a loved one.

While I’ve been in a similar “zone” many times, I don’t think I could ever be that deep into it where my reaction to that kind of thing would be so blah.

And I kind of feel bad about it.