Tiger Woods – Man Without a Home

(But now with a goatee to hide his flubbery receding chin.)

There are a few things I’d like to get off my chest about Tiger Woods. 

--The extended overture:

1. Tiger Woods was never going to be a force for diversity in men’s golf.  He was allowed into the club because his dad had been in the services and Tiger was only half-black and he would have embarrassed whites otherwise.  And of course he did have ability. As the remarkable British television documentary showed, Tiger was steeped in notions of entitlement, misogyny, disloyalty, and hierarchy.  If Michael Jordan said “Republicans buy shoes, too,” Tiger would have said “Democrats ain’t got no shoes cause they don’t work.”    In his half-way, Tiger did inspire Asians, though, ironically many who may not have shared his gender or appetites.

2.  The guy is amazing for how he was able to separate himself mentally completely from anything at all outside of golf.  Golf was the playground he’d been bred up to; it was only when he got off the course that he really had to go to work, on his cellphone and with the girls and against his family and so on. 

3.  The media was totally complicit, failing their duties when we had the wildest cat in the jungle on our hands.  The extent to which other players were cowed is also surprising, but then, maybe they just weren’t in Tiger’s private playboy club.  So fearsome was his “club,” he invalidated even truth.

4.  His insane driving, that has now been, predictably, surpassed, by equipment and others, has cheapened the game, and turned golf into a game of driving and then pitch and putt.  No golf course will ever feature trees on its fairways anymore, and “deep rough” is called grass somebody let grow more than a couple days.  Everything about his game is amazing, and some of his putts are beyond memorable.  But his winning by 10 strokes and never playing on the fairway of the hole he was actually playing—that wasn’t/hasn’t been good for golf.  Golf will and is taking a long time to adjust to things like that, just like tennis made the ball bigger, and so on.  (Incidentally, has anyone noticed that Zina Garrison and Evonne Goolagong ploughed fields the Williams sisters haven’t even watered with their private perfumes?)

5.  Never did like Woods because he was such a petulant, privileged type.  It has been odd how people I’ve known have liked and then disliked Tiger.  I just never liked him, but I _do_ like bad guys sometimes.  I loved McEnroe.  He had a sense of humour.  People said he was trying to mess up opponents by getting mad, but I don’t really buy it.  I think he charged himself up by getting mad at himself and really believing he’d been hard done by.  Kenny Linesman; the Sutter brothers; Charles Barkley—you hate those guys, but in a way they are irrepressible.  Tiger was just a simpering wimp who couldn’t take camera shutters (camera shutters!!!!!) and acted like a wet cat after.  A privileged prince, who treats all those around him accordingly, that is what Tiger clearly was.

The long-winded coda, but/and without the symphony:

Remember all that feely-goody thing about more minorities in golf, after the golf world was basically shamed into letting people like him play on courses?  How the whole world would play golf after Tiger? I haven’t seen any African-Americans lately, and it is improbable that there are any on the horizon.  Historically speaking, Tiger may look like a fly in a pail of milk, but it may turn out to be more because of him than despite him, what with the example he’s set and the encouragement he’s given to those who don’t have names like Tag Heuer.   If you ever wanted anyone to pull off a stereotype, Tiger, like Obama, both of whom have only half the cred, have sure pulled it off.  This must say a good deal about everyone, somehow.  Anyway, the idea that Tiger would somehow open up golf beyond the white rich exclusive country clubs was one honky tune, and if any people are going to do that in the future, they are going to come from places such as Germany or Northern Ireland or England, etc., just as they used to come from Spain or Argentina or whatever.  You shouldn’t have had to take your 2-irony out of your bag for that one, anyway—but no-one, least of all golf journalists like Lorne Rubenstein, would venture there over the past decade or so, and are not likely to as long as they need a paycheque.

I remember—and I know I am not wrong—I wouldn’t write it if I could be sued--how Jack, with that kind of set chin and settled mouth and brow of his, sort of glanced off to his right in an interview, as he always did, and suggested how maybe once Tiger settled down, he’d become an even better golfer.  Jack *was* referring explicitly to marital settling down, not settling down on the course.  Jack’s eyes, like those of many mature men, were a little bit back in his head, and he was thinking of himself no doubt, but also others, and he was imagining that, once Tiger just got his whole life settled—wife, kids, spread, sponsorships—Tiger’d probably get it all in gear.  Jack said it kind of wistfully and with a detached look.  He had been asked a question about the rocketing Tiger, a question to which he was accustomed, but he was kind of thinking about himself, and about his passing from legend to myth.  He just said that Tiger was a young phenom who’d settle down and settle in (remember, now, the famous Sports Illustrated pictures of the Nicklaus family with their shirts pinned back) and Jack just kind of figured that Tiger’d settle down, like he did, and once he did, oh look out, Jack would be history.  It was just a very wistful interview Jack gave, as though he saw the future, and accepted it, despite the legend he still was.  Jack had once been a creation, too.  I also wonder, though, if at the back of Jack’s eyes and in his words there wasn’t a hint of something a lot of people knew but no-one could speak of because of the Tiger mafia and media complicity.

That is, how is it that this guy could be the greatest golfer in the world and still have 50 girls of availability on speed dial (amply proven over and over) and sponsors and  media and (somewhere after the fact) a family, too?   How is it that he could rendez-vous, from Vegas to Miami, at a flophouse and his buddy’s house and her house and a pancake house and still win on Sunday?  This guy was Mickey Mantle X 25, Derek Sanderson X 50.  Clearly, Tiger has a dissociative sociopathic personality.  In interviews, he has talked about how he has to separate himself from the media so that he can have his own time, his own space—well, if he ain’t shedding, then Woods comes from another planet, because what he achieved amidst all the texting without t’s is truly amazing.  It is almost amazing to think just how Tiger could go out and win and maintain such superb poise, all the while having on the back burner no end of call girls and pay friends while his euro-model wife sat in a Florida mansion with his infant child.  Now that is concentration.  That guy had enough "space" for 18 3-putting dictators.

Jack maybe knew it; surely others on tour knew it, too.  But the media was silent.  And even after the fact, they are cowed.  Canada’s main golf journalist, the chummy Lorne Rubenstein, and sometime sidekick Bob (“bubbly”) Weeks, of course had nothing to say (see no evil. . . ).  Only recently has Rubenstein rather timidly disapproved of Tiger.  Lorne knows he’d never golf again on private links if he said anything revealing about Woods.  I sometimes wonder about journalists like Lorne; they do face tough decisions: you’re either too stupid to see it, or smart enough not to.  The result is that people like me, who don’t get to hang out near Tiger every day, and don’t get paid for “covering” golf, have to make it up for themselves after the fact, from public-access Florida police reports, for example.   Shame, shame on the game, and all the seedy wannabes who attach themselves to it, like Lorne and Bob.

Well, well.  Here’s some things we know now:

--Tiger’s dad (as the British documentary amply displayed) taught his son the worthlessness of women and that fidelity was no value for a man.

--Tiger’s mom, nevertheless, who probably does have some vestigial familial or ethnic pride of her own somewhere, was somewhat peeved.

--Tiger’s sponsors—those who hung with him—are creeping (key verb) away slowly as he fails to win or contend.

--Tiger’s wrecked-up knee, caused by the incredible torque of his swing, may prevent him from getting to Jack’s 18 majors.  You almost have to wonder if, if Tiger weren’t so untouchable, there could have been a coach out there somewhere who could have said to Tiger, “look, Tiger, we’ve got to change this follow-through, or else you’re not going to. . . .”    Can Tiger go from being a great starter to a premier reliever, like Dennis Eckersley?  Can Tiger take his diminished driving and physical deterioration and find new mental maturity and solidify other aspects of his game?

Well, we’ll see.  The man’s a nasty prig, born and bred up that way, all the way.  His talents, especially with putting (which is, as they say, where the dough comes in), have often seemed sublime.

But what of Tiger after?  Will Tiger ever be in the booth, jolly with a salty goatee, like Feherty?  Heh.  Tiger has only ever had one home, on the course.  He didn’t have it in Earl’s cheatin’ urb. He couldn’t have it with a coveted model, and if he did have it, it had to be an endless succession of hotel rooms and pancake houses.

Will Tiger get to 18, or the untouched 19?  It looks more and more doubtful, if just in reach.  He will probably disappear into a vast ersatz Jacksonian Florida estate, his belly growing, his chins tripling.  Girls coming, girls going, guys in sunglasses wearing all the baubles he once endorsed, coming and going, coming and going—little sign of “Tiger.”

He was—may be still—a great golfer.  But he was never a good man, and his beneficence, in the short term, is not apparent.  And it took him to reveal as much.

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