Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant Are Too Stubborn to Quit

June, 2002. Tiger Woods, 27 years old and at the peak of his powers, cruises to an easy victory in the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black, wrapping up an utterly inconceivable stretch in which he takes seven out of eleven major championships. That same month, Kobe Bryant averages an incredibly impressive 27-6-5 on 51% shooting in the NBA Finals, and the Lakers effortlessly sweep the Nets on their way to a third straight championship. Kobe, then 23, becomes the youngest player in the history of the league to get three rings.

It all feels like freaking eons ago.

Let's go back another seven years. In June of 1995, the New York Times published an article about the preponderance of back injuries among golfers. Tiger Woods, then a skinny amateur sensation, was specifically mentioned. Larry Dorman, the author of the piece, pointed out that "respected physical therapists privately contend that Woods's enormous wide shoulder turn and tremendously fast rotation will result in back problems down the road." In fact, Woods's back had already flared up a bit at the Masters that year. Teenagers, even teenage golfers, do not typically experience back problems. This probably should have raised more eyebrows than it did at the time.

It's common knowledge that medical experts knew early on in Tiger's career that his swing, with its unprecedented ferocity, might eventually cause his body to break down. But, in the moment, it was hard for the rest of us to take it that seriously. Tiger seemed invincible; besides, for the purposes of a full and dominant career on the PGA tour, all he really needed was to stay injury-free until he was in his mid-forties or so, and how many professional golfers have been decimated by injuries in their primes? (Equally unthinkable was the idea that Tiger would one day blow up his own marriage and send his personal life into a tailspin after being caught with an array of Side Pieces that would leave the most notoriously licentious NBA players in awe, but that's a subject for another day.)

As we are witnessing now, the medical experts were quite prescient, and Tiger's legions of fans have largely accepted that he's entered a different stage of his career, that it's increasingly far-fetched to expect the Tiger of the early 2000s to roar back to life. Most golf experts and analysts have certainly come to realize that the "the Tiger Woods era is over," as The Golf Channel's Brandel Chamblee—who, oddly, seems to actually take pleasure in Tiger's travails—recently put it.

The one person, of course, who has refused to honestly reckon with Tiger's new reality is Tiger himself. His reliably positive—often glowing—assessment of where his health stands at any given moment, or how his latest recovery from injury is coming along, has almost reached the point of parody. "I'm only going to get stronger," Woods again predicted just before the British Open, a couple weeks before leaving Firestone Country Club in so much pain he could barely remove his spikes without help. "I had been playing with [the back injury] for a while and I had my good weeks and bad weeks. Now they are all good." Oozing confidence heading into the Open, Tiger proclaimed, "I can do anything I want. I'm at that point now." He finished 69th. Over the last three rounds. Eventual champion Rory McIlroy beat him by twenty shots.

Tiger arrived at Firestone for the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational with that legendary confidence still intact after his poor performance at Royal Liverpool. "I would like to win these two events and not have to worry about anything," Woods ludicrously said, referring to the WGC and the PGA Championship and how they relate to the FedEx Cup. He gimped around the course at the WGC—Tiger's wince has, by now, replaced the fist-pump as his signature move—and missed the cut at the PGA. McIlroy won both events.

Kobe Bryant's dominance of his sport in the first decade of this century was almost—though not quite—comparable to that of Tiger Woods. For years, the Black Mamba was universally considered the best wing player in the league, the most reasonable facsimile of Michael Jordan we had seen—before LeBron took his game to another level and reached heights Kobe never could. Nevertheless, Kobe was still going strong in the 2012-2013 season, his seventeenth, when he averaged 27-6-5 while carrying a lifeless and pathetic Lakers team to the playoffs. We might soon look at that season as something similar to Tiger's surprising 2013 campaign, in which he won The Players Championship, four other tournaments, and was crowned Player of the Year: the last great season for an ultra-competitive athlete congenitally unable to accept anything but greatness.

Kobe went down with a ruptured Achilles the fourth-to-last game of that 2012-2013 season. Coach Mike D'Antoni should probably have been charged with a crime for how hard he was riding his aging star. Kobe had played in every single game of the season and was averaging more minutes than anyone in the league other than Damian Lillard (who is twelve years younger and had played sixteen fewer seasons than Kobe at that juncture). His comeback attempt in the 2013-2014 season was reminiscent of many of Tiger's in recent years, as it never really got off the ground, doing nothing but leaving the superstar looking like a shell of his former self and creating more doubt about the future. He played in only six games before fracturing his knee and shutting it down for the season. This month Kobe is turning 36 and his place in the current NBA hierarchy is suddenly unclear.

Unclear to everyone but Kobe, that is. When told that ESPN had put him 25th in their NBA player rankings in October of 2013, he said anyone who agrees with that assessment "needs drug-testing." Indeed, there is no evidence that Kobe's swagger and confidence have waned even a little bit. In December, Kobe was asked by Jeff Van Gundy if he's still capable of being the best player on a championship team. Kobe seemed genuinely shocked and insulted by the quite reasonable question. "Of course," he shot back.

The context for Van Gundy's question was that Kobe had just signed one of the more baffling contract extensions in recent memory: two years and $48.5 million, keeping him as the highest-paid player in the league in his nineteenth and twentieth seasons. The contract severely limited the organization's ability to build a contending team via free agency and virtually assured that Kobe Bryant will never win another NBA championship. Which means he'll almost certainly be one short of Jordan, forever. (Closer than Tiger, at least, who remains four majors behind Jack Nicklaus. The narrative there is slowly shifting from "Will he pass Jack?" to "Will he win another major?")

Not only will the Lakers not win the championship this season, but in a loaded Western Conference, they're very likely to miss the playoffs. While losing Pau Gasol and striking out on Carmelo Anthony, the franchise made a series of puzzling moves, from paying an absurd $18 million for two years of Jordan Hill, to adding the dreaded Carlos Boozer, whose mysterious hairline has been the most exciting thing about his game for a few seasons now.

Judging by Kobe's forecast for the upcoming season, though, it's possible nobody has told him that Pau is gone and Melo didn't sign. No one even knows who the Lakers' second-best player is. "Championship," answered Kobe without hesitation, when asked about the team's goals for 2014-2015. It shouldn't surprise anyone that someone like Kobe is increasingly in denial. When asked about how Kobe will deal with his final years, a former NBA head coach told ESPN's Ramona Shelburne back in 2011: "Kobe can be his own worst enemy because he has so much pride, so much confidence in himself, he may not realize when he's lost too much."

It remains to be seen what these two athletes, arguably the two most homicidally competitive athletes since Jordan, have left in their respective tanks. At 38, Tiger could conceivably have another decade of competitive golf; Kobe's window is closing faster. On the other hand, Tiger's fall feels more surreal; while Kobe was always striving to be the next Jordan, Tiger was the Jordan of golf.

But they both must be be jarred by the loss of their superpowers. Rory McIlroy and LeBron James have now indisputably taken over the sports Tiger and Kobe once ruled with iron fists. While the two aging icons have both had highly publicized personal issues, their sports' new kings are in many ways the antithesis of their predecessors. Rory is warm and amicable. He signs autographs and openly respects the abilities of other players, unlike the ice-cold Tiger, who never gave an inch. LeBron is the anti-Kobe, a selfless star who is recognized as perhaps the greatest teammate in the league today; playing with James has literally been the top priority for several respected NBA players as they weighed their options in free agency this summer. These two are not only supplanting Kobe and Tiger at the top, but doing it in a way that dramatically exposes their flaws—both personally and professionally.

We all know the old adage about the athlete always being the last one to know when he's in irreversible decline. But with notoriously proud and competitive legends of their sports like Tiger and Kobe—and Jordan before them—watching this process unfold is all the more intriguing. Tiger is casually speaking about winning back-to-back tournaments while the whole world can see that his body and his game are not remotely ready to compete at that level. Kobe is repeatedly declaring that a championship is his goal this season while Vegas places the odds of such a thing happening at 75 to 1. There is little doubt that both Tiger and Kobe both sincerely believe they are still capable of reviving their broken-down bodies, imposing their will, and once again ascending to the top of their sport. But they are also two of the smartest American athletes we have ever seen. So how much longer can they maintain this state of denial?

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