Difficult year for Woods

Last Modified: Friday, December 4, 2009 at 12:05 a.m.

For a guy worth around a gazillion (rounded up) dollars, Tiger Woods has had a rough year. He didn't win a major, losing after holding the 54-hole lead for the first time in his career -- to the immortal Y.E. Yang -- and then: The Wreck.

Later: The Revelation.

Where Woods goes from here, I have no idea. As guarded as he is, we may never know. At least not fully.

I do know this: Tiger's infidelity was not surprising. Neither was trying to keep the cheating from going public. Both were poor decisions.

Why did Woods cheat (allegedly a lot) on his wife, Elin? Well, it's not because he traded up in the looks department. He did it because he has to win. In golf. In endorsement deals. Everything, even women. If he didn't, he wouldn't be Tiger Woods. He'd be ... Phil Mickelson? A club pro?

Before this happened a friend of mine recently relayed a story from The Masters. In short, everything stopped when Tiger walked onto the practice green. The entire atmosphere changed.

I call it the "Michael Jordan Effect." Previous generations probably named it after Muhammad Ali.

Either way, you start to wonder what causing that type of public reaction does to a person. Jordan has his own well-known shortcomings and turned in a Hall of Fame speech that at best could be said to lack humility.

I imagine a person would start to think he could do just about anything and get away with it. After all, if you can do just about anything on the golf course, on the basketball court or in the boxing ring, why couldn't you do anything out in the real world?

Woods probably could have -- mostly -- had he come clean from the start. But he's Tiger Woods. Everybody will just accept an obviously bogus explanation for the crash at face value.

Except, we don't anymore. The world has moved on, for better or worse.

Woods' statement reeks of ignorance. It speaks of an insular life and a singular focus.

"Although I am a well-known person and have made my career as a professional athlete, I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means," he wrote. "For the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives."

Really? Really, Tiger? You're dismayed? I am dismayed that you are dismayed by "the full extent of tabloid scrutiny."

You went to Stanford, so I'm guessing you were just too busy at the driving range to know better. Nobody's that dumb. Some are that clueless.

If Woods had made his statement, minus the dismayed part, from the start things would have gone much better for him. The media scrutiny would have been bad, but not like this. Watergate? Monica Lewinsky? Sometimes the cover up is worse than the crime.

And, America is a pretty forgiving place. But we hate being lied to. The media hates it more and when the tabloids smell blood they make sharks look like domestic cats.

"But for me, the virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one's own family," said Woods.

True, but you give up a certain amount of privacy when you made that first gazillion dollars, especially when you make a lot of that money because you are a celebrity.

When Jordan retired (the second time), you became the world's most famous athlete. It's not a bad gig if you can get it, but there's a Faustian bargain included. For instance, when you cheat on your wife, crash your car and lie about the whole mess, your privacy gets violated.

Tiger's family's privacy has been violated as well. That's on him.

The cheating's on him too. As for the hubris? I think that's on us, John Q. Celebrity-Maker. We build them up to be Superman. And when it turns out that Clark Kent really is just a farm boy from Kansas, we tear them down.

Like I said, the world, for better or worse, has moved on.


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