As I write this, the lead on ESPN.com’s feature article is the following:
Tiger Woods' admission of infidelity was followed by his indefinite leave. Walking away is a step in the right direction, says Bob Harig.
The story involves Tiger’s press conference yesterday in which he made two main statements. The first is that he committed infidelities over the course of the past several months or years. The second is that he will stop playing golf, the thing he is better at than anyone in the history of recorded time, for an extended and indefinite period, in order to concentrate on his family.
I don’t have to tell you that in the coming days and weeks, every media outlet will, and many already have, throw the great heft of their support behind Woods’ decision. The LA Times’s lead, for example, includes the phrase “Tiger Woods finally does the right thing.” We have come to an immediate agreement as a culture that, thank god, our most unsinkable athletic idol has taken the correct course of action and put himself back on the path to justified deism. I am not so sure.
What made me question this whole parade was the fact that I watched the press conference, and, to my naïve surprise, it sounded like a sports press conference. You know, one of those insufferable, lowest-common-denominator political exercises in which the athlete in question gives out as little information as possible with the primary goal of not offending anyone. Though Tiger seemed to display some genuine emotion, all I heard in his words was: The other team played great out there and we just didn't execute. Well, I just try to take it one day at a time and help the team out. Thanks, but I couldn't have done it without the guys around me.
My qualm is with our knee-jerk acceptance of this as an appropriate medium and message. If Tiger is taking a drastic turn towards the sincere, which we all readily believed, how did he manage to do it in the language of the least genuine form of communication since we cracked the Enigma?
Just think about what he is actually proposing to do here, and think about what happens in actual marriages. He has just shamed and embarrassed his wife in front of the entire world, doing damage to her dignity and self-esteem she will never be able to fully recover. If this happened to me, my first thought would be, OK, time to quit my job for a while so I can spend every waking minute with this woman who hates me so much that she smashed the window of my car in with a golf club. I’ll probably be a more complete, loving person once I stop doing the one thing I love more than anything else in the world and which has consumed every aspect of my life since early childhood. It’s a big void to fill, but that’s just a larger space to be filled up with love! And fidelity! And not thinking about the other woman I was literally on my way to get nasty with two days ago!
This is not what people do. There is a reason we have a term called a “trial separation” and not one for “trial period of at least several months where you stop living your daily life to be around each other 24/7.” Tiger’s move sounded valiant and wholesome, but only if you live in the Family Circus universe. His wife is deeply hurt and murderously angry. Can you even imagine how this is going to play out on a human level?
Tiger: Well, it’s just great getting to spend time with you like this! What do you normally do at this time of day?
Elin: I have lunch. It’s lunch time.
(silence)
Tiger: I could eat. What do you want to eat?
Elin: I usually eat with one of my girlfriends.
Tiger: Jesus Christ I love golf.
It’s a basic fact of human nature that being around your spouse constantly is not a formula for a successful marriage. Quite the opposite. (This is even ignoring the obvious point that the career in question is golfing, which has been used as a trusty excuse for much-needed marital sequestration since the first Scotsman discovered he could get significantly more time with the sheep if he told his wife he was participating in a respectable activity that took an entire day and could only be done deep in the woods.)
While my tiny but sanguineous heart certainly goes out to Mrs. Conspicuously Blonde Member of the Woods Family, do you really think this is what she wants? Of course Tiger is going to cut off his relationships with the luckiest ugly white girls not named Monica; the whole world, his wife included, knows who they are. In the long run, however, I think this will just serve as an example of the timeless phenomenon best articulated by humanity’s greatest font of wisdom, B.B. King: “when you catch ‘em cheating, you know the only thing you’re doing is makin’ ‘em a little bit smarter so they won’t get caught next time.” I truly believe Tiger won’t cheat on his wife—but not because he doesn’t want to.
Now, this is not an indictment of Tiger’s morals. I’m not blaming him. He is doing absolutely the best thing for his family, because this response is exactly the one the media and the general public are conditioned to respond positively to. Before writing off his pandering as weak-willed or unnecessary, remember that, no matter how indirectly, we the Nike-loving people are all collectively his employers, and thus the people who ultimately pay for his children’s Fisher-Price My First Escalades, or whatever they play with when they’re not having pure distilled excellence gently injected into their soft skulls. We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, but this whole episode shows that the sporting worlds’ claim that sports celebrities are somehow different, more morally accountable, is absurd.
Look, I’m all for holding celebrities to higher standards of behavior, but can we stop pretending that they are role models? The whole exercise is insulting to our collective intelligence. We idolize these people because they possess freakish talents we can never harness. To be a professional athlete in this day and age, you live an entire life obsessively measuring and improving your own performance. You retain a staff of coaches and trainers, all of whom keep a monolithic focus on making you stronger and better. Add to the mix a necessary schedule of constant self-promotion and a hearty cocktail of (at a bare minimum) legal but dangerous drugs. Does this sound like the recipe for a model citizen? It is not, and we don't want it to be. Athletes are entertainers. To call them role models for our children is just as silly as applying that title to Paris Hilton or Slash.
When will we learn to admire athletes for merely for behaving like regular people, or at least stop pretending that they usually do? When will we reset our standards of acceptable behavior for them to resemble the same ones we hold ourselves to? As it stands, by encouraging irresponsible behavior that follows familiar memes of the “good citizen” or the “role model,” we lose our ability to define both. Maybe the sporting press should take an indefinite leave from matters of personal ethics.
