Admire Tiger Woods's swing, ignore his swinging | Dominic Lawson - Times Online
What is the point of Tiger Woods? There is only one of any interest, which is that he may have played golf better than any other man, living or dead. Actually, there is a second point, connected to the first: he is the first black man to have achieved any sort of eminence in a sport which had excluded that part of the American population. One comedian put it this way: “Fifty years ago, 100 white men chasing one black man across a field was called the Ku Klux Klan — today it’s called the PGA Tour.”
What is not interesting about Tiger Woods is that he has been unfaithful to his wife — just like millions of other apparently happily married men, every day. Besides, as Charles Pierce, the American sports writer who got closer than any of his colleagues to Woods, wrote last week: “I can’t say I’m surprised ... one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound.” Perhaps that was a secret kept from the countless members of the general public who have followed Woods’s career; but I still find it hard to believe that those followers will be dismayed, even if they are sufficiently naive to be surprised that a good-looking superstar spending months of the year away from his family fell prey to temptation in the form of the occasional cocktail waitress.
Remember that the vast majority of Tiger’s fanbase — presumably the people his many sponsors aim to reach — are men who care much more about golf than about the women in their own lives. The only thing they will feel about the collagen-enhanced harpies now emerging as Woods’s nocturnal companions is jealousy that these women have got close enough to ask the great man about the secrets of his driving off the tee. It is Tiger’s swing that obsesses them, not his swinging.
You get some sense of this when you Google “Tiger Woods” and discover that the search engine thinks it is a hundred times more likely that you will be interested in seeing a slow-motion film of his golf swing than anything to do with his girlfriends.
No matter how fixated Tiger’s fans are with his swing, it is mere dilettantism compared with his own obsession with the mechanics of hitting a golf ball where you want it to go. This is someone who has been trying to perfect it since the age of two. When he was three, he shot a 48 over nine holes at the Navy golf club in Cypress, California. Those who say that Woods had sought fame and must now pay the price — in the form of being denied any sort of privacy — miss the point that he had never wanted publicity for its own sake, or even at all. All he wanted was just to play golf, and, of course, to win. As he remarked a few years ago: “I did envisage being this successful as a player, but not all the hysteria around it off the golf course.”
His fate is similar to that of the equally prodigious Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, who has scored more international runs than any other man. Tendulkar is not able to leave his front door in his native country unless he is heavily disguised: a modest man, his outrageous talent has in effect made him a prisoner in his own home.
It is true that similar pressures have been endured by sporting superstars in the past; but in a world where every passer-by has a mobile phone with a built-in camera which can immediately transmit images to any television station in the world, that absence of privacy is now at an altogether different level. This is presumably what Arnold Palmer — the first golfing star of the television age back in the 1950s — meant when he said he “wouldn’t trade my life for [Tiger’s] for all the money in the world”, and what Woods himself meant when he said he likes scuba diving because “the fish don’t know who I am”.
Woods has certainly made the money Palmer alluded to: according to Forbes magazine he has become the first sportsman to accumulate a billion dollars. The bulk of that has come from product endorsement, rather than directly from winning golf tournaments — and it is this that has led commentators to mock his statement last week that “I would also ask for some understanding that my family and I deserve some privacy no matter how intrusive some people can be”. His critics argue that if he wanted to be private, why put himself in every newspaper and magazine in the world via advertisements for firms such as Nike, Gillette and Tag Heuer? This is disingenuous: the truth is that this Tiger would be tantalising prey for every scandal sheet and internet “celebrity” site just the same — even if he had never made a single product endorsement.
Besides, with the possible exception of an early commercial for Nike, in which he said: “There are still [golf] courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play because of the colour of my skin,” Woods has been rigorous in avoiding any suggestion of giving moral lectures based on his pre-eminence. Thus the suggestion — by a number of sports writers who really should know better — that Tiger’s car crash in his back drive “could be his Chappaquiddick” is an appalling lapse in both taste and judgment. He hasn’t abandoned any of his girlfriends to die in his car, unlike the late Ted Kennedy; and Woods has always resolutely refused to join in any campaign that could be construed as even faintly political. Thus, when the NAACP asked black athletes to shun South Carolina, which still flies the Confederate flag at its state house, Woods declined, telling Sports Illustrated: “I’m a golfer. That’s their deal, you know.”
Cynics will argue that such an attitude would have been dictated by Woods’s sponsors, appalled at the thought that joining such action might offend white consumers in the southern states. Perhaps so; but it seems to me equally likely that Woods himself abhors any controversy that might distract him from his monomaniacal, tunnelvisioned pursuit of sporting victory.
For Woods is the control freak’s control freak — and this can be seen in what little we know of him, apart from its obvious manifestation in the form of screaming anguish on the golf course when the ball doesn’t land exactly where he intended. It is said that he makes his hotel beds before the maids can do so, because he can make them even more tidily. He is also the terror of hotel laundries, because of his obsessive concern about the precision of creases in his garments.
It is only in this context that I am surprised by his extramarital excursions. Surely it would have occurred to him that a cocktail waitress-cum-aspiring actress called Jaimee Grubbs, who had already taken part in a reality TV show, had the potential to be a deep bunker in the otherwise immaculately smooth fairway of his life. Then one recalls Pierce’s remark: once a hound, always a hound, even (or particularly) when the wife is burdened with the care of two babies.
Yes, that is selfish behaviour; yet it is impossible to succeed at the highest level in any sport — and especially individual sports — without being selfish: it demands putting your own requirements ahead of family, from an early age. Perhaps Woods is more selfish even than most sporting superstars — his performances when competing for his country in the Ryder Cup seem to fall below the level he reaches when playing only for himself. Even that, however, does not fracture the enduring love affair of golf fans for Woods. They just look once more at that swing — in slow motion — and think: nothing on earth could be more beautiful than that.
As for those who aren’t interested in golf — well, they shouldn’t be in the least bit bothered about what someone called Tiger Woods gets up to at night. As the man himself said, it is a private matter.
I really couldn't agree more.
