SOME TIGER!!

Along with many millions of curiosity seekers, I watched the Tiger Woods press conference. Not much of a “conference,” since no questions were allowed. It was a non-event. It was Tiger being Tiger. He wants to be in control at all times. So far, all his efforts in that direction have been flawed. This one was no better.

I am more than a little tired of people in the public eye asking for privacy. He should have though of all that while he was shamelessly and publicly misbehaving. He was out there where everyone could see him.

Hey – he is a golfer! He is not a touchstone of humility, decency, or any other qualities. Those are qualities that we assign to him that we assign to so many celebrities. They become what we want them to be, and cash in on our gullibility.

Perhaps my favourite, when it comes to misguided adulation, is the shrine that has been erected around the life and times of “The Duke” John Wayne. In Orange County, not America’s most liberal place, the airport is named after him. He represents, and this is the secret behind misguided hero worship, part of the national mythology. Because I watch Turner Classics, I often see him, square jaw pointing into the wind, as a war hero. The other day I watched him in “They were Expendable” a movie based on the battle for Bataan during WW2. There he was – all done up in patriotic red white and blue. With all these roles, plus so many of those “winning the west” genre of films, he became associated with the indomitable American spirit, the spirit that opened up the west, the spirit that survived the Battler of The Bulge.
The facts are not important. The fact is that when his colleagues were off fighting the war – Clark Gable as a Flying Fortress gunner, Gregory Peck as a bomber pilot, and dozens more, Wayne was back home, along with Ronald Reagan, making patriotic movies. He didn’t serve. It is rumoured that he had some kind of medical exemption. It is also rumoured, although more quietly, that he managed to elude the draft board.

Not to make a big point of scraping the gold dust of idols, just to illustrate that we all need idols, however fallen they may be. Tiger is one such idol. Yes, he was not shy of allowing himself to be portrayed as a paragon of family virtue and it is only in hindsight that we see the hypocrisy of it all. But it is a hypocrisy in which all of us are complicit. We want heroes, stained or otherwise. We want our Hollywood stars to be the people they are on the screen. We need Robert Young to be a saintly father figure (Father Knows Best) even though he was an unregenerate drunk. We wanted Ingrid Bergman to be the epitome of purity. And – we wanted Tiger to be what he is not and never was.

To put a finer point on it: if Tiger had really wanted to make it up to his millions of fans, he should have returned to the course as soon as the scars from his beating had healed. If he wanted to re-unite with all of us, he should have had a real press conference with questions, no matter how obvious or embarrassing the questions might be.

Tiger has played peek-a-boo with all of us. And he did it again.

Frankly, I don’t much care whether he turns back to Buddhism or re-unites with his wife, or succeeds in getting reporters to stay away. He is the premier figure in golf – not a leader in social reform. Let him play. Whether I or you forgive him or not really doesn’t matter.