Reading Tiger Woods: the Legend, the Myth, the Man

Really. Tiger Woods has been sleeping around? Really, his relationship with his fembot wife from the Swedish Bikini team was a sham? Really, the man whose father proclaimed he was the messiah not just of golf but of the world is an egomaniac? Really? Really, the man who spends his time traveling the world and playing on the nearly ubiquitous but penultimate man-made landscapes that must add up to“the geography of nowhere” and who lives in what I can only imagine to be the ultimate gated community of Windermere, Florida, has a woman in every port? Really? Really, the man who scores of fans admire for his conquests of these landscapes is also notching his belt with female conquests? Really.

I must admit to a number of things about Tiger Woods and this incident. First, I must admit that I have been a Tiger fan. I am not a golfer but I watch golf when Tiger plays, especially when he is either “making a charge” or atop the leader board. For whatever reason, I thrill to watch Tiger destroy a course and the field of primarily pasty white golfers plus Vijay Singh and a handful of Asians. I especially like those type of runaway victories that smack of godhood, like when he destroyed the hallowed Augusta National only a few short years into his pro career, deconstructing (a non-English teacher would probably say “destroying”) a course that has since been remade and so remains the idol of the game.

I was also a sucker for Tiger’s one-legged victory in the US Open just before announcing he had a torn ACL and would undergo season-ending knee surgery. The greatest of athletes seem to have this in common: they are able to perform at championship levels when mere mortals could not. Like Jordan’s flu-performance against Utah in the NBA finals, which I remember clearly, or Willis Reed’s legendary appearance after a knee injury, which I wasn’t even alive for but can understand the legend. In this way, too, Tiger is transcendent, and I ate it all up.

I must also admit that when I heard about Tiger’s affair(s), I laughed. All the signs were in place for exactly this sort of thing—the messiah-status created by his father Earl Woods, his marriage to a bikini model, his general egomania, his occasional swearing outbursts that blatantly disregarded both social norms and role model status.

Tiger Woods’ Deconstructive Power

Despite all these despicable traits, however, I lionized Tiger in my own mind. Why? Tiger Woods is soon to be 34 years old, my own age; he’s a Gen-Xer, like me. In many ways, he is symbolic of my generation, especially as he has smashed perhaps the final high place of the white sporting world: the sacred ground of golf.

This is what I will call the deconstructive power of Tiger Woods, and some personal experience does enter into my feelings about Tiger at this point. For two summers during college, I caddied at one of Minnesota’s most prestigious golf courses, Interlachen Country Club. Interlachen is too short and too landlocked to host a modern PGA tournament, even though in 1930 Bobby Jones famously skipped a shot across the water of number nine to win the third leg of his triple crown.

Today, however, or at least when I caddied there in the Nineties, Interlachen was still a stronghold of the old boys’ club. I heard both women and minorities derided there. A woman I caddied for dubbed my Colombian-born friend, “The black,” not the worst of sins, perhaps, but symptomatic of how removed their world was from people of color.

For two summers at Interlachen, I kowtowed for tips, carrying two bags at a minimum price of $30 each, times two rounds per day for an absolute minimum earnings, assuming the weather was good, of $120 a day. (My best day was probably around $230. Yes, there’s money in golf and I have prostituted myself for it.)

The one Tiger joke I heard then, as he emerged into the professional world, came from an old woman at least in her late seventies, one of my early and poorly paying “loops.” I don’t remember how the body of the joke went except for the general question-answer format, but I clearly remember the punch-line. It went like this:

“What do you call Tiger Woods as a professional?”

And the answer: “A Thai-Coon.” Lovely, a legitimate race word coupled with a racist slur that together referenced the majority of Tiger’s ethnic makeup: his mother is Thai and his father is African-American, with some Cherokee and even Chinese blood.

“Ha, ha,” the woman laughed after she delivered the punch line and hit her crap tee shot wide right. “I love Tiger. I think he’s great.”

Yes, don’t you just love him?

I loved Tiger Woods because, if there was anything that Gen-X could offer the world, I thought, it was Tiger, a one-man wrecking ball of the vestiges of white privilege in Western culture. This was our issue; it was Cobain-esque in its own way:

With the lights out it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us,
A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

Okay, it’s a stretch, but I guess Tiger was that racial amalgamation that seemed to defy all the social structures that seemed broken to our angst-ridden generation. After growing up with discussions of why African-Americans couldn’t play quarterback, I saw Tiger as an in-your-face answer. After one of Tiger’s early Masters’ victories, after hearing Fuzzy Zoeller joke that Tiger should serve “fried chicken” and “collard greens” at the Masters Club Champion’s Dinner, I pulled all the more for Tiger. Tiger would rule the white man’s game and prove the white man didn’t rule.

So I pulled for him. My wife pulled for him. Millions pulled for him. Even my mother-in-law—she’s Lao—pulled for him, citing his Thai blood.

A Psychological and Archetypal Reading

So, yes, I bought into the myth of Tiger Woods; I helped make the myth of Tiger Woods. An important part of the myth was the name itself: Would Tiger, named for the ultimate predator, be Tiger if he had instead remained Eldrick? This begs another question: Was Tiger born or was he made by Earl Woods’ self-fulfilling prophecy? Whatever the case, by age two, with predatory nickname in hand, Earl and Tiger had found their way onto the talk show circuit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHkA_983_s). This was to be more than fifteen minutes of fame, however. Child prodigy was only the beginning. Tiger won an unprecedented three U.S. Amateur titles, then turned pro to more of the same. Then in 1996 came the Sports Illustrated article where Earl Woods declared Tiger a messiah to unite the races:

"Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl Woods said. Really? And the elder Woods’ answer:

"Yes, because . . . he's playing a sport that's international. Because he's qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He's the bridge between the East and the West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power" (Smith, Gary. “The Chosen One.” SI 23 December 1996. Online.)

True godhood on the golf course followed the prophecy. Then there was a queen for King Tiger. Now a harem. All of which makes complete sense.

If Tiger was to be a modern day messiah as Earl declared, then he had to be a messiah of the global capitalist dispensation. Thus Tiger achieved global celebrity on all continents, the press of crowds of men and women rising above even rock star status; thus he won championships on several continents and the path is now being cleared for him to win a gold medal in the Olympics; thus he is the face of a billion dollar economic empire; thus he married an international bikini model; thus his indiscretions included the new global technology in the form of “sexting”; thus, once again, Tiger makes his home nowhere and everywhere, on the ubiquitous golf course and in the ubiquitous gated community. I would dare to say that Tiger is rootless and identity-less.

Furthermore, Tiger is a messiah of a secular, postmodern age. This means, true to my Gen-X admiration of him, that his multiracial pedigree and global citizenship is his validation. It also means that his morality points us not to some higher moral plain but rather to the idea that man is the measure of all things: Tiger lives by his own moral code—he is above mere mortals in how he can be expected to live because of his genius. I would even venture to say that this is how we as a culture want him to be—nay, this is what we’ve groomed him to be.

Consider the television and film archetypes that modeled Tiger’s promiscuous behavior. On a lesser, comic scale there was Sam Malone from Cheers, a now laughable would-be stud but an Eighties star nonetheless. More significantly, there was Bond, James Bond, whose utter isolation as a pawn of Cold War governments leaves him nameless, placeless, loveless—and yet the ultimate lover. Bond’s character is an archetype, a character whose legacy stretches back in literature to at least George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose characters from the comic Don Juan to the serious if melodramatic Manfred were “terrifyingly attractive”--and typically as good with the ladies as Byron himself was. Biblically, of course, we can stretch back to Solomon if we’d like. In any case, Tiger Woods is a type of Byronic hero for our day and age, a Wild West gunslinger (clubslinger?) who blows into town for a time (tournament) and after a short stay rides into the sunset with another notch in his belt.

What I’m arguing is that Tiger’s actions are exactly what we as a culture expect—no, demand. He’s playing the role perfectly: he is a genius yet uncontrollable, dominant yet dangerous; he’s from nowhere and everywhere. And his modern-day harem is the ultimate status symbol, the ultimate object of conspicuous consumption reserved for the elite. His behavior, if he can emerge from this “scandal”—it’s really not a scandal, simply plot development for Entertainment Tonight—relatively unscathed, will only add to his status in our culture, not detract from it.

My cases in point are other athletes who’ve emerged unscathed—even triumphant—from would-be scandals. Tom Brady, before his knee injury and the decline of the Patriots, garnered cultural praise for his playboy fatherhood status: an AP article on a preseason game lauded Brady for attending the birth of his child with his ex-girlfriend, an actress, then flying to the preseason game and leading the Patriots to a victory, all the while getting more press for dating Giselle Bundchen, a supermodel.

There will be no better proof that this is the kind of behavior we want from our heroes than what it will take us to forgive him, which is simply this: more winning. Remember Kobe Bryant’s alleged rape case several years ago? Wiped clean as soon as he returned to championship form. Only if Tiger follows the formula of Mike Tyson—namely, he starts losing, tattoos his face, and bites Phil Mickelson’s ear off—will he lose face with us as a culture. This goes to prove that other corollary of global capitalist culture: no press is bad press. If Tiger Woods emerges from this and continues his run at major championships, we will chalk it up to his godhood, and this episode will in the future be noted in trivia questions that document Woods’ messiah-run: “In what year—the same year that Tiger Woods didn’t win a major—did word of Tiger Woods’ multiple affairs first break?”

Naturalism and Metanarrative

If I’m arguing that Tiger is merely the product of our age, an archetypal character in some metanarrative of human existence, then I find myself having to reconsider Tiger as a character. Perhaps Tiger can’t help it—his behavior, I mean. Perhaps, as with the characters in Naturalist fiction, Tiger is simply a victim of forces greater than himself. Perhaps Tiger is simply another Tess of the D’Urbervilles—or, more appropriately, Alec what’s-his-name, the upper class slime ball who takes advantage of Tess. If this were the case, if we consider Tiger a sort of pawn in a larger story, then the measure of Tiger’s worthiness, true to the best naturalism, is how he conducts himself in the face of these forces: if he acts with nobility and dignity, which might include anything, I suppose, (depending on one’s perspective) from a public apology to making up with his wife by giving her a lot of money to “brave” acceptance of his outcast status (very Byronic) to rehab for sex addiction to claiming he has a medical condition that’s part of his very nature to fatalistic suicide (both very naturalistic). I would be willing to bet on which path he chooses. Any of them will draw press and since no press is bad press, any of them will do.

But now I myself must face the question I’ve raised. Is Tiger a victim of forces larger than himself? If so, does this clear the way for me personally to pull for him once again? It’s an interesting question. My gut tells me I won’t, that I don’t pull for slime balls. Of course, doesn’t the fact that I won’t pull for slime balls illustrate that I myself was looking for a messiah in Tiger Woods? That my definition of messiah includes sexual morality but not swearing or egotism (very Gen-X of me) but that nonetheless I was looking for a messiah, perhaps recast in my own image? Haven’t I just argued for several pages that Tiger’s a product of his age, that he’s been manufactured by a global capitalist culture and is therefore somewhat less individually culpable than he might be? On both accounts, yes. And isn’t Tiger still able to destroy the idols of golf with a flawed character? Yes, but it would have been better for him to maintain moral superiority while doing it. That’s what Jesus would have done.

You should hear great irony in that last line.

I hate naturalism. I hate thinking that there are forces greater than ourselves that can pop us like a pimple. I hate thinking that I might be carried along by a narrative in which I play an unwitting part. This, as I understand it, is quite American of me. As an American, I want heroes who are themselves a force of nature. I want a hero of unbending will.

Wait a minute. There I go again.

Perhaps the scariest thing in all of this is how we (I) construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our (my) heroes. And how scripture and Christ deconstruct them all. Ultimately, in Tiger Woods I can see the mold for how we (I) cast my idols and how the narrative of scripture and example of Christ casts them down. There is nothing new under the sun after all.

So will I pull for Tiger Woods after this? Certainly not like I used to. Really, I won’t pull for anyone quite the same again. Until the next time someone emerges who transcends the game itself, whose sterling character is above reproach and . . .

Lord, help us (me).