We only knew the golf star, never the man
We never knew Tiger Woods. Thinking we did was the only reason we should have been surprised by all that has unfolded over the past nine years as one of the greatest North American athletic stories of the past century has unravelled.
Let’s be clear. We don’t know, and never knew, any of the really important stuff about Woods any more than we know about the dishevelled and dirty souls panhandling on the street corner that we pass every day and either pity or ignore. We are equally distant from both.
So we really don’t know how or why the 41-year-old Woods came to be arrested at 3 a.m. Monday morning on a DUI charge in Jupiter, Fla., just days after happily proclaiming that his latest back surgery had been a success.
“I haven’t felt this good in years,” he wrote on his personal website last week.
“Unequivocally, I want to play professional golf again.”
Instead, now he faces another problem, another road block, another smudge on his public profile.
In a statement Monday night, Woods insisted alcohol was not involved.
“What happened was an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications. I didn’t realize the mix of medications had affected me so strongly,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to ensure this never happens again.”
For years, it was straightforward to list Woods’s spectacular achievements in golf, to list his massive list of sponsors, to calculate his career earnings and understand his personal wealth. In a Trumpian view of the world, he was rich and a winner of 14 major championships, and that explained everything, right?
His personal story, growing up as the only child of Earl and Kutilda Woods, introduced to the game of golf before he was two years old, could be understood in its broad outlines. The relationships between he and his father and mother, well, we all know that what happens in a household is rarely understood outside that household.
Woods later married a beautiful Swedish woman and had two children. As his fame rose, he gained a reputation for being arrogant and snarly on the golf course. We knew he could also do seemingly impossible things with a golf ball at his feet, like hit an improbable six-iron out of the sand on the 18th fairway at Glen Abbey to win the Canadian Open.
These are things we knew. Facts we could understand.
But in a world where we seem to have more information than ever before about famous athletes, we also seem to have less understanding about their lives, choices, frailties and vulnerabilities. So of course the true essence of Tiger escaped us.
He never chose to bare his soul, to really explain himself. Maybe because he couldn’t. Most of us can’t.
When he crashed into that fire hydrant in 2009, and when all those messy details about his extramarital activities entered the public realm, the notion that any of us should have been surprised was, in fact, ridiculous. Those events were proof that we didn’t know this man, this golf champion, any more than we knew another fallen superstar athlete, O.J. Simpson. The Oscar-winning documentary O.J.: Made in America last year illustrated how Simpson’s public persona was completely at odds with who he really was, a useful warning note for those who imagine they understand celebrities and star athletes.
So be careful to join in all the tuttutting you’re hearing now about Woods and his scrape with the law on Monday. We don’t know the details and nothing has been proven.
The dazed mug shot is awful, sure. Perhaps we’ll find it was a simple mistake. Or perhaps we’ll find it was a mean, reckless decision that knowingly endangered others. A crime. Just don’t tell me you know why it happened.
Here’s what we do know. Woods may have played his sport at the highest level to which it has ever been played, and now he can’t anymore. Not even close.
He reappeared on the tour late last year and showed some encouraging signs. A new swing with less torque on his body. He was welcomed as a non-playing member of the victorious U.S. Ryder Cup team, and the players seemed pleased to have him around as a cheerleader.
Late last month, however, Woods underwent an anterior lumbar interbody fusion procedure, the fourth back operation he’s experienced in just over three years. He won’t play again in 2017. Maybe never.
What would it do to a person to have such miraculous talent in a sport, or in music, or in art, or in mathematics, and then to have it ripped away in a fraction of the time it took to develop it?
Moralists might say he should have been grateful to have had that talent in the first place. But they weren’t the youngest (by two years) to ever win the Masters, and win it by 12 strokes, the largest margin in the history of that fabled tournament.
They didn’t have what Woods once had in his body and brain, in his hands and heart, only to lose it at a relatively young age. Almost overnight.
So let’s not pretend we understand what drives him, or hurts him, or leaves him dazed and confused, or makes him make harmful decisions. The best we can do is accept his story, just as he has and will have to accept the consequences of his decisions. But we don’t know Tiger Woods. We never did. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for the Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.