Since last year, the 33-year-old male elephant has been treated with reverence as a deity after being identified as the first auspicious white elephant to be discovered under the reign of King Rama X, as the monarch is also known.

The elephant is to be presented as a gift to the new king sometime after this weekend’s coronation ceremonies, the first the country will have seen in 69 years.

“There is no greater merit than to raise such an elephant for the king,” says Thanabadee Promsook, 35, who runs the center housing nine other regular elephants.

Thanabadee refers to the elephant as “His Highness” and kneels before him daily. “Plai” in Thai means male elephant.

Elephants classified as white in Thailand are not necessarily albino or solid white but are more pale in color than normal and are rare and especially revered.

They are regarded as a symbol of kingship and treated as deities, mainly due to the mythical white elephant Airavata, or Erawan as Thais call him, who is the vehicle of Indra, king of the Hindu gods.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night ... that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children - daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 - who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes - maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career - one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago - if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

“The Lion King,” Walt Disney Co’s latest remake of its own beloved animated films, shows off advanced techniques that blend virtual reality, live action and digital imagery to bring a hyper-real feel to the animals and African settings.

“Everything here is so safe and tame and carefully calculated as to seem predigested. There’s nary a surprise in the whole two hours,” wrote Todd McCarthy for The Hollywood Reporter.

McCarthy predicted, however, that the film “will be duly gobbled up by audiences everywhere like the perfectly prepared corporate meal it is.”

The new version, starring Beyonce and Donald Glover as the voices of lions Nala and Simba, is a faithful, sometimes shot for shot, recreation of the 1994 film, including much of the original dialogue and Elton John’s hit songs.

“That raises the inevitable question of, ‘Why bother?’,” wrote Variety critic Peter Debruge, calling the film “undeniably impressive but incredibly safe.”

“The answer can be spelled in dollars,” Debruge wrote.

“The Lion King” starts its international rollout in China on Friday and arrives in the rest of the world in the middle of next week. The 1994 film was a $968 million global smash that spurred a long-running Broadway stage show and more than 20 international productions.

Despite the hyperrealism of the new version, some critics found the film lacking in emotion and said the life-like singing and talking lions, hyenas and warthog felt odd.

Some reviews were unusually harsh. Alissa Wilkinson at culture website Vox.com said the movie lacked magic, calling it a “bloated retread without a reason.”

“Be prepared for a crushing disappointment,” wrote Scott Mendelson at Forbes.com.