10:40 am EST -- The Green Blazer awakes after a 12 hour online poker session that lasted until 5:00am ... Another all-too-familiar final table bubble that pays so much less than the effort is worth.
10:45 am -- The robust Italian espresso pours out of GB's DeLongHi machine into a stainless steal cup. Espresso is GB's newest vice -- much different from Tiger's vice that he is about to apologize for.
10:50 am -- GB turns on The Golf Channel to catch the last 10 minutes of their Tiger Woods speech pregame. I still chuckle at the idea of a speech pregame. The Golf Channel reports that the Golf Writers Association are boycotting the speech. I think that many of them will now look back at that decision with regret.
11:00 am -- I switch channels to NBC because I wasn't 100 percent certain The Golf Channel would actually have the speech live, and I didn't want to miss a single word. I should have known better.
11:02 am -- Tiger emerges from backstage and the NBC commentator is cutoff mid-sentence by another broadcaster.
11:03 am -- Tiger starts to speak quite robotically from the sheet of paper in front of him. He seems more nervous and awkward than I ever remember seeing him. The first thing I notice is his receding hairline. It was always there, but it probably dropped back a full inch in the last few months.
11:07 am -- Something goes wrong with the feed and the screen goes dark for a moment. The audio stays intact. When the visual returns, it is from a side profile and will remain that way for the rest of the speech.
11:09 am -- Tiger does the first thing that I didn't expect and he admits that he thought the normal rules didn't apply to him. "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 thought this was the best part of the speech.
11:11 am -- Tiger asked the media to "please leave my wife and kids alone." He is wasting his breath.
11:12 am -- I'm surprised to hear Tiger talk about his religion. I never knew he was a Buddhist.
11:15 am -- Tiger's speech ends and he walks down from the podium to hug his mother. I still wonder if the rumors of his father's infidelity are true. We will likely never know for sure, but my intuition says yes.
11:16 am -- Tiger then moves towards his wife Elin's family. He hugs her mother. I still think the family is somewhat enamored by his presence. This will likely never go away. He does a sort of handshake/hug to two younger guys who I assume are Elin's brothers. They do not seem angry at him.
11:17 am -- I switch back to The Golf Channel as I like listening to Brandel Chamblee better than any other non-golf commentators.
11:18 am -- Charlie Rymer begins to talk and you can see the tears building in his eyes. His bottom lip starts to quiver and he can't seem to hold the tears in. I laugh out loud at the idea of Rymer crying after Tiger's speech. Rymer says that when he sees someone showing that much emotion it makes him emotional. I did not see the emotion in Tiger that Rymer speaks of until Tiger hugged his mother after the speech.
Brandel Chamblee takes Tiger's back on the highly scrutinized speech timing. He says that he was watching Paul Casey and Sergio Garcia criticizing Tiger on CNN and notes that Accenture's logo was plastered behind them -- an advertisement they wouldn't have gotten had Tiger not chose this time. Chamblee also notes that Tiger's speech was scheduled hours before the Match Play broadcast, and had Tiger really been trying to stick it to his former sponsor Accenture, he'd of held the speech during the coverage.
11:30 am -- Rymer's emotional response leads to The Green Blazer's
first ever Twitter post.*I don't know if either of these people were the pioneers, but I'd like to credit both Dan Peterson (ESPN) and Bob Smiley (Author of 'Follow the Roar') with the formatting idea of this post.
