Woods should stop clinging to status as an American icon
Golfer’s grovelling apology for his latest brush with ignominy suggests a man with misplaced sense of his personal importance
Tiger Woods was pulled over on a road called Military Trail, appropriately for a man who went on the trail of a fantasy life as a US Navy SEAL – one of many acting jobs he has filled in his golf career.
One thing we knew already was that distressed people do stupid and dangerous things, not least in middle age, when the old certainties evaporate. But normal was never part of Woods’s vocabulary, which is where his problems seem to be rooted.
His statement following his arrest at 3am on Monday on a DUI (driving under the influence) charge did what statements from busted celebrities often do. It piled contrition on to a confusing explanation in ways that only raise more questions.
If “alcohol was not involved”, as he claims, and the police report appears to corroborate, what was he apologising for? He says “an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications”, which has landed him with a DUI for an offence is take it day by day. There’s no hurry. But, I want to say unequivocally, I want to play professional golf again.”
These announcements fly in the face of the long-term damage to his body, and are no doubt intended to wring the last juice from his commercial tie-ups. But even he must doubt their validity. The words lead back to a long pattern of pretending. In his time, Woods has acted as the grateful recipient of white patronage in Country Club America, the wholesome family man when he was playing the field spectacularly, a wannabe US Navy SEAL obsessed with emulating his father’s military career, and now a striver against serial injury vowing to return to the sporting heights he once occupied.
There was always a manufactured feel to this movie, but that choreography was easy to overlook when he was ripping up the Augusta National course, dazzling British crowds at the Open and running up 14 major tournament wins. In his closed world, with its Nike-clad goons, he was at least locked on to the idea of sporting brilliance, of domination, in a way that globalised a game hardly renowned for ethnic diversity. Golf was blessed by his presence.
This control-freakery was fine so long as Woods was winning; yet the character trapped inside that play has turned out to be a lot more normal – more human – than the sweetly declining-elder-statesman script would allow.
If American golf could write his ending, it would be as the next Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer: a Ryder Cup captain and course designer who went round the circuit burnishing his own Sun-sentinel reported: he has played only 19 with one top-10 finish. His Michael Jordan, Privacy
ripped Solitude. certainly now