Welcome to all of you who are looking at this blog for the first time because you read the piece on me by Mike Thomas in the Sun-Times. http://www.suntimes.com/business/2072262,SHO-Sunday-wolf28.article
I thought I'd try an eye-grabbing headline, which is why I semi-facetiously suggested that Tiger should have coldcocked mom after he left the podium.
(I should be more topical here. Okay. Quick Olympic hockey take. Chris Chelios said that the gold medal is more important than the Stanley Cup. Well, maybe that's easy for Chelios to say. He, after all, has won multiple Cups. The USA gets a hockey gold medal every couple or three decades. But the Blackhawks have been waiting since the year before Chelios was born. I'll take the Cup. Okay. Now back to Tiger.)
As Rick Telander has said two straight Sundays in the Bright One, Tiger self-flagellated in that public apology. And, of course, at the sex clinic he's not allowed to self-flagellate or even watch Jimmy Stewart nuzzle up to Donna Reed in "It's a Wonderful Life" while she's talking to Sam Wainwright on the phone.
Tiger is grandiose. His dad said Tiger would be better than Gandhi. (Even Gandhi was caught with his loin cloth down.)
Dad and mom dedicated themselves to making Tiger great but they didn't dedicate themselves to each other. They broke up. So Tiger gets to feel guilty about the sacrifice his parents made for his career, and he's angry his parents weren't together.
Now there's ambivalence that can drive a man into the arms of the nearest strumpet or two.
Tiger, as I've said, didn't owe the public an apology. His wife, yes. His kids, sure. But the public? The only way he wronged the public was by endorsing Gatorade, which he just lost as a sponsor, and deservedly so. Because Gatorade is a drink only a real athlete can benefit from. The couch potatoes who watch Tiger don't need it.
But Tiger hasn't learned much in his month and a half in sex addiction therapy. That's okay. It took him a lot longer to effect his last big swing change.
Meantime, even the camera that was trained on him during that speech blinked. There's only so much humiliation a piece of machinery can look upon.
You notice how Tiger said he felt that he had worked so hard that he somehow felt he deserved to taste the temptations placed before him? Maybe he shouldn't have had to work so hard. It's tough trying to be God. You wind up looking more like Fredo, banging two at a time.
Wondering if this has something to do with being black and the pressure to do the extraordinary to make up for lost generations. It's not enough for Tiger, like Barack Obama, to be Number 1. Tiger and the President have felt the mandate to transcend sports and politics respectively. Maybe Tiger should settle for beating Jack's record in the majors. (You think Tiger will win those last five by the time he's 46, which was Jack's age when he won his last Masters?) And maybe the President ought to settle for health care in increments.
They could learn a lesson from a broadcaster trying to resurrect a career. Little steps. One blog post at a time.
