Golfers? Golfers are boring. Whether or not that statement is absolutely true, it has the appearance of truth, and sometimes that's enough. In this case, it's partly because there are an awful lot of rich, white country club members out there, and partly because there is something about golf that makes it difficult to be anything but tightly controlled.
It does not behoove most golfers to be interesting. It behooves most golfers to be restrained.
Back before all the recent unpleasantness, Tiger Woods took this idea to its logical conclusion and essentially scrubbed away most of his more obvious human-like traits. Sure, he still got angry and swore on the golf course, and he was pretty good at the whole celebration thing -- Explosive roar! Fist pump! Awkward high five!--but every public pronouncement was a masterpiece of control.
"Athletes aren't as gentlemanly as they used to be," Tiger told Sports Illustrated in Gary Smith's messianic 1996 profile. "I don't like that change. I like the idea of being a role model. It's an honour".
Again, this was before all the recent unpleasantness, which Tiger vaguely addressed in two separate five-minute interviews released simultaneously on Sunday, to ESPN and The Golf Channel. They were the first questions he had publicly answered since he drove over a fire hydrant and into a tree in the wee hours of Nov. 27, after which the humiliating secrets of his serial infidelity began to spill all over everything.
And so here we are, four months into the stunning fall of Tiger Woods, and it is unclear if he has really changed at all.
Oh, Tiger Woods has changed in the eyes of the world, sure. He seems much more human, if not in the most admirable fashion. The salacious details of his various dalliances keep cascading through the tabloids and gossip rags, through TMZ, and through rather adult websites like sextingjoslynjames.com,in which Tiger's alleged text messages to a woman who goes by that name can be read on a console labelled an iBone. (The young lady's bio says she "has been seen on Inside Edition, Playboy Online, Hustler magazine and in the public eye speaking out about her romantic relationship with Tiger Woods". Well, you can't say Tiger had boring taste in women. Awful taste, yes, but not boring)
But he is still trying to exercise the highest order of control, after losing so much of it. Tiger is on the march back to competitive golf, beginning with The Masters in a couple of weeks, and the damage control machine is finally gearing up.
"I was living a life of a lie," he told ESPN's Tom Rinaldi. "I really was. And I was doing a lot of things, like I said, that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are, and that can be very ugly.
"But then again, when you face it and you start conquering it and you start living up to it... The strength that I feel now, I've never felt that type of strength".
He's not so strong that he didn't release these twin five-minute bursts when they could be buried under the twin media avalanches of the NCAA basketball tournament and American health-care reform. And he isn't so strong that he isn't splashing back down in the iron embrace of Augusta National, where the media and crowds -- sorry, "galleries" -- can and will be carefully managed.
The irony of Tiger seeking shelter at Augusta -- which saw the first black golfer at the Masters in 1975, only 28 years after Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and which accepted its first African-American member in 1990, and then only ahead of the PGA and USGA posse -- is as rich as he is.
But then, that is part of the sacrifice Tiger seems to have made. Since that 1996 Nike ad in which he said, "There are still courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play because of the colour of my skin," and since the seminal 1997 profile in Esquire by the great Charles Pierce, Tiger Woods has simply boxed the non-golfing parts of himself away.
Let's go ahead and concede that there are people in sports who have done far worse things, and who are not required to perform this heavily scrutinized series of faux-Kabuki PR rituals. Tiger merely cheated on the supposed love of his life; he wasn't accused of beating her, like, say, Astros pitcher Brett Myers, or Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald.
But he is the most famous athlete going, and like Alex Rodriguez and Mark McGwire he is still trying to sell us the appearance of truth. So we are within our rights to question what he's trying to sell.
And while there were moments in which he seemed to ring true -- when he talked about explaining this to his kids, or about facing his mother and wife -- he mostly came across as the same IMG-trained automaton that he's been since he was a young man.
You slept with all those women because you stopped meditating? Buddhism will save you? "It's all there in the police report"? Woods has been living a deeply calculated life for so long that you have to wonder if he's even capable of authenticity -- off the golf course, anyway-- at this point.
The best question Rinaldi asked -- besides, "Why did you get married?" -- went like this: "Eleven months ago ... I asked you, 'How well does the world know you?'What's your answer to that now?"
And Tiger said, "A lot better now".
Maybe, but it's none of his own doing. We still don't know who he really is. He is trying to be boring again, to vanish back into golf, by using the appearance of truth and hoping that it's enough. Until he hits golf balls like he used to -- better than anyone else, to be specific --it won't work.
Of course, it might not work either way. But it's probably the only shot he's got.
National Post
