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Tiger Woods went from golf's greatest legend to a cautionary tale

Michael Sykes   For The Win

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Good morning, Winners! Welcome back to the Morning Win.

It's always sad to hear about an athlete suffering from a devastating injury, but hearing that Tiger Woods tore his Achilles on Tuesday was particularly sad, as our Blake Shuster so eloquently wrote after the news broke.

If we weren't sure about it before, we certainly are now. This is the end for Tiger Woods as far as competitive professional golf goes. He'll surely still rehab and play in Tomorrow's Golf League — it's hard to fathom the man not supporting his own venture. And we'll also surely see him around other golf events, maybe even supporting his son as he continues on his own golf journey.

What makes this so sad to me is not that Tiger is injured. It's that we all knew this was coming. We didn't know what sort of injury it'd be, but we certainly knew there'd be something that sat him down. He wasn't just going to walk away from the game. Here's more from Blake:

"Like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and many GOATs before them, Tiger's brain was never going to accept that it was time to hang it up. Only his body could do that. This week, his body sent him the clearest signal yet: A ruptured Achilles tendon that ended his latest comeback bid before it could even begin."

The honest truth is that Woods should've walked away a long time ago. He didn't have anything else to play for. If he wasn't already your GOAT, he would never be. At this point, he was playing just to see if he still could. Meanwhile, the laundry list of injuries continued to pile up.

This is my greatest fear with all of the greats. It's what I worry about with LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry. It's what we witnessed with Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. They didn't get to walk away from the game. They limped.

They left it as icons, sure. But in the end, they're just cautionary tales. They're an example of what happens when you become the old man at the club. You never want to be the old man at the club. You've got to know when it's time to go home. Tiger didn't. And, now, this is how it ends.

We'll always have the great times. We'll never forget the highs we had watching him golf. Those moments will be the highlights of the book on him.

But the final chapter will always be a bummer. You really, really hate to see it.

Good and bad news for the Cavs

With a win on Tuesday night against the Nets, the Cleveland Cavaliers pushed their current win streak to 15 games in a row.

A 15-game winning streak is nothing to scoff at, of course. But do you know what's better than a 15-game winning streak? Two 15-game winning streaks. And this is Cleveland's second.

The Cavs are the sixth team in NBA history ever to pull that off. The other five:

That's the good news. The bad news, you ask? Only two of those previous five teams won the NBA Finals in the season they pulled the winning streak off. The only two were the '71 Bucks with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the 2000 Lakers with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

This isn't to say that Cavaliers fans should be worried. I'd argue that there aren't too many teams they should be worried about at this point. The point here is that there's still a lot of basketball left to be played.

It's Tyrese Time

Damian Lillard has to give his watch to Tyrese Haliburton now. This shot is absolutely bonkers.

The Pacers were down by three points to the Bucks in the final seconds of the 4th quarter on Tuesday. Then Haliburton did this.

The hoop plus the harm, folks. Wow. Haliburton hits the free throw and wins the game. What a sequence.

This isn't just a good shot — it might actually end up being one of the most meaningful shots of the NBA season. Haliburton's game-winner here put the Pacers on even footing with the Bucks at 36-28. Milwaukee still technically holds the No. 4 seed in the East because they'd beaten the Pacers twice already this season and hold the tiebreaker. But this win for Indiana gives it a shot at tying the season series up with Milwaukee and potentially pulling ahead if they can pull out another win against the Bucks in a few days.

Again, folks. What. A. Shot.

Quick hits: Stephen A. Smith won't leave LeBron alone ... Rich Rod hates fun ... and more

— Stephen A. Smith called LeBron confronting him about Bronny "weak." I honestly just want him to stop talking about it at this point.

— Rich Rodriguez won't let West Virginia players do TikTok dances. Cory Woodroof has more on this.

— I wrote about why it's such a grave mistake for the Eagles to accept Trump's invite to the White House.

— Meg Hall has more on the Big 12 tournament's awful court. Why in the world would they do this?

— Puka Nacua changed his jersey number just in time for Davante Adams. Christian D'Andrea has more on that.

— Here are the best bets for the Players' Championship from Blake Schuster.

That's a wrap, folks. Happy Wednesday. Peace.

-Sykes ✌️

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