Thoughts Regarding Tiger Woods

“The wise man loves, everyone else desires.”   –  The ancient Roman writer Lucius Afranius
You see God, and he offers you a bargain. With a catch.
Here’s the bargain.
If you can swat and prod a little white ball around a lawn slightly more accurately than some other guys, he will give you a billion dollars.
But here’s the catch.
You will have to agree to go home after your matches and only make love to your wife.
With a further catch.
Your wife will have to be a stunningly beautiful young Swedish model who loves you with all her heart.
You spit in God’s face.

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Tiger Woods, and his game, have never interested me. My life has been filled with more interesting matters. Watching paint dry. And the grasses grow, all over the world. The cars passing in Death Valley. Play it? A bit of miniature golf. Fun. But I know guys get into it, sports. Me too, at times. You get attracted to personalities. But in this man’s case he doesn’t have one, beyond that blank, corporate-ready slate upon which companies scribble to their profit. Oh, okay, I’m being unfair. To the extent I’ve seen him, I guess I have noticed a few slimy tendrils of testiness, impatience and conceit shoot forth too. But basically he’s in that great present-day tradition, in sports-crippled America, of the Superstar Who Says Nothing– Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Eli Manning, Michael Jordan– they almost raise nullity to an art form– Who Then Gets Everything.
So why is the Tiger Woods story still of importance?
Because it shoots ultimate truths at us. And they’re tough ones to take.
1) America likes to fool itself, almost to the point of insanity. Whether it’s in regard to financial bubbles, global warming denial, Obama as Messiah, JFK as a good family man, Tiger Woods as a role model….And if the truth explodes in our face, somehow we’re always stunned.
2) Men are obsessed with beauty, but not loyal to it.
3) Related to 2): There’s a restlessness in the human male that drives him always from dark to light and then back to dark, so that the light is just a passing accident, just a rest-stop on a journey that’s instinct-drawn. I know there are exceptions, but I think there’s not enough of them to stop writing.
4) What this all says about women:
I think the reason the media is losing interest in the Tiger Woods scandal is that the women are so uninteresting, and so of a piece, you might say. Really, we’re reaching the point where a drug angle maybe needs to explode to give the story fresh legs. (Let’s mix metaphors, everybody!) Or at least an explosive divorce trial.
The women– his harem– are pathetic. Pathetic in the way they fool themselves, and lie to themselves. All these women actually seem to think they were having a “relationship”, maybe a lasting one, with Tiger Woods. Their relationship was that of a urinal to its user. Pathetic with their botoxed faces and injection-swollen lips, and how too much plastic surgery has made their faces as often skeletal as beautiful. Pathetic in their desperation– to land a man with sexual accommodation and looks– before they “age out”. In how pathetically they dress themselves, yet think they look stylish and “hot”. How awkwardly they now pose themselves and handle themselves in public– for fifteen minutes, anyway. The heart-breaking extent to which they desire to have someone love them, to the point they believe in what’s not there, and a man who isn’t there. (A “blank…slate upon which” to scribble.) The pity you feel for a Rachel Uchitel, who’s probably been forever unhinged mentally by the loss of her fiance on 9/11.  And the contempt you feel for this “hostess”– and can’t we finally dispense with those last five letters?– all those “hostesses” in his harem!– who, according to the N.Y. Daily News (12/13/09, 18-19), “played hostess to the stars….’and she’ll sleep with the celebrities, too, which is an added plus,’ says the club publicist.”
The whole thing makes you want to vomit.
5) Nonetheless, how guys envy Tiger. Articles and blogs not written. And every other Alpha Male who’s freed of the need to work women exhaustively, work women emotionally, to get them.
On To The Next Scandal!