Tiger Woods shared an emotional embrace with his kids, Sam and Charlie, after the final round of the British Open last month, and on Wednesday he called that loss a “teachable moment.”
Woods briefly held the British Open lead before playing the 11th and 12th in three over par. He made a birdie on 14 and parred his way in, shooting 71 and tying for 6th, three strokes behind winner Francesco Molinari. TV cameras caught him kneeling down and hugging his kids on the way to the scorer’s tent.
“I told them I tried and I said, ‘Hopefully you’re proud of your pops for trying as hard as I did,'” Woods said afterward.
On Wednesday at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, as Woods prepares for his first WGC event in four years, he was asked why he used the word trying instead of playing.
“We as athletes, you are not always going to play well,” he said. “We can’t control always how we play, but we can control our effort level. I have always tried to encourage them in how they participate in sports, especially team sports they play. You may have a good game but your team may lose, but still it’s your effort level. In team sports you can hide. In individual sports you cannot. You are exposed. They saw their dad get into contention, end up leading the tournament and end up losing the tournament, but I tried to the very end.”
Woods said it was important for Sam, 11, and Charlie, 9, to see how much he was “grinding” late at Carnoustie.
“They said, ‘Well, you weren’t going to win,'” Woods said. “I said, I know I wasn’t going to win, but that doesn’t stop me from grinding. So yeah, that is a teachable moment cause they were there in present, in person. Sometimes you can’t always see that on TV.”
“Failure is part of what we do out here,” he continued, “but there’s also things you can learn from it.”
You can watch the complete segment below. Woods tees off for his first round at 10:20 a.m. ET on Thursday alongside Jason Day.
