Brennan: Tiger Woods stuck taking swings at accusations

There must be days when Tiger Woods wishes he could be young again, that he could return to a time before he broke his leg and injured his back and ruined his marriage and was twice linked by rumors, not necessarily facts, to possible illegal drug use.

Once, Tiger was a golfer who won majors. Now, at 39, he has become something much more complicated. He's a topic of gossip and innuendo more often than he probably ever imagined he would be. Sometimes he's a punch line. Often he's in the news for the wrong reasons.

Some of this is his fault, some of it isn't. But the man who once was nothing but a sports legend currently leads a life that looks a lot more like it belongs on a soap opera, which is not a place he wants to be.

It happened again Monday when word surfaced that a little-known professional golfer named Dan Olsen went on a radio show in Lansing, Mich., last week and said quite confidently that Woods — who has said he is on leave from the PGA Tour while he tries to sort out issues with his poor play — was serving a suspension for a failed drug test.

Oh boy.

"These claims are absolutely, unequivocally and completely false," Woods' agent Mark Steinberg answered back. "They are unsourced, unverified and completely ridiculous."

"There is no truth whatsoever to these claims," PGA Tour executive vice president Ty Votaw said. "We categorically deny these allegations."

Next, we heard from Olsen, a 48-year-old journeyman who last played on the PGA Tour in 2011.

"I retract the entire interview," he said on the web site of WVFN-AM in Lansing. "My comments were ill-advised."

So Olsen has backtracked, and rightly so, unless he has a way to prove his claims, which he apparently does not. For golf, drug accusations such as these are a shock to the system. Professional golf is new to the drug testing business, beginning in 2008. (Drug testing at the Olympic Games began in earnest in 1972.)

When testing was about to begin on the professional tours, there were those in the sport who maintained it didn't need drug testing because the players are so honorable they call penalties on themselves and always do the right thing.

Reality soon set in and golf joined most of the rest of the sports world in testing its athletes. But unlike other Olympic sports, golf didn't sign up with the independent World Anti-Doping Agency and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. It chose to run its own testing, as all the other big U.S. pro sports leagues do.

WADA and USADA make public all of their sanctions and punishments, be they for performance-enhancing drugs or recreational drugs. The PGA Tour has announced the names of two golfers who violated its anti-doping policy: Doug Barron and Bhavik Patel. However, it does not necessarily announce the names and punishments of those who violate its recreational drug policy.

So, if an Olympic athlete says he or she hasn't been suspended, you can believe them because if they were, it would have been announced to the world by WADA or USADA. In a sport like golf, there is no such assurance, so rumors can and likely will continue to fly.

Woods also has controversial ties to Canadian doctor Anthony Galea, who was investigated by the FBI for allegedly providing performance-enhancing drugs to elite athletes and pleaded guilty in 2011 to a charge of bringing unapproved drugs into the United States. Woods has acknowledged receiving treatment from Galea at his Florida home but said he did not receive any illegal drugs.

This is the nature of sports in the so-called Steroids Era, which hasn't by any means ended. Drug rumors have circulated in Olympic sports like track and field and swimming for more than 40 years, and in baseball and football for at least 30 years.

In some ways, Tiger bearing the brunt of unfounded accusations like those from Olsen is simply golf's way of catching up.