He is everywhere else. Why not in the middle of the special holiday issue of Hello! magazine? The Tiger Woods feature is a rare bleak moment in this otherwise obsequious, cheerful paean to stars and "their plans to eat, drink and be merry."
The only other such grim entry: a spread that, in its own way, perfectly mirrors the Tiger soap opera. It's about the disgusting amount of time the young, beautiful Ekaterina Ivanova spent sleeping with the Singing Raisin, 62-year-old Ronnie Wood. But please note: Wood has left her . There are legions of beautiful women, practically dying to attach themselves, like limpets, to the relatively few very rich and unattached men in the world. The goal is to marry them, bleed them as would a medieval physician, and walk away with much of their fortune, and with any delusions these men had about being loved for themselves.
Men like Tiger know this is how the game is played - and that the game has two players. Woods, lately being excoriated as though he were the Green River Killer, quite possibly did marry Elin Nordegren - at the time a shop clerk who aggressed that she was not a "gold digger" - for the reasons he told one of his (alleged) many mistresses: My marriage is "a sham," he is reported to have said, erected to maintain his "family-man image."
Every day, another busty vulgarian steps forward, carrying on as though Woods, this whole time, was John Shaft (if Shaft had been less principled). Whatever Tiger was or is, at least Shaft's women, unlike Nordegren, understood he was "a complicated man," as Shaft's theme song put it.
Am I alone in finding all this hot news about Tiger alluring? He fascinated before, with his method and style. He is, among other things, the first black man to rock a hideous golf outfit, and all the way to the top, no less.
But now we also find out that he's less like the cheerfully square Phil Mickelson than like the legendary badass John Daly, who has never been able to stand the tedium, or, more accurately, the rigid conservatism of the game. Long John - a nickname earned for his driving distance off the tee - was a notorious womanizer, and once remarked, "Some folks say I don't deserve such a beautiful wife. But hey, I earn money."
Daly is correct. Elsewhere in the pages of Hello! is a portrait of Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana; and of David Beckham and Victoria. Are the women quoted talking about the shocking former womanizing of their pig-rich husbands - or about the "shame" (a word stuck to Woods) it has brought to them and to the worlds of food and footy? No! Because they, like Vanessa Bryant, who rolled silently in gifts of diamonds from Kobe during his rape trial, know not their place but their station.
Men cheat, all of them. Especially, and extravagantly, those "who can" as former president and shirt-chaser Bill Clinton has sagely observed. So where is the love for Tiger, right now? If Hello! cannot squeeze out a drop of raging idolatry, something is terribly wrong; the magazine has hitherto seemed incapable of brooding.
The Woods soap opera won't die, and is fanned daily, in spite of the Associated Press having now declared him the athlete of the decade. Last month, after his wife appears to have acted out a key scene in The Shining on his car (this, following the unctuous Rachel Uchitel's claim in the National Enquirer of her affair with Woods), his mother-in-law was whisked away in an ambulance, suffering from "stomach pain."
Soon after, the Night of the Living Skanks started playing, live, and one of them, a trampy waitress, released his mildly dirty voice and text messages, including one that plaintively begged her for "a huge favour." As the hoochie zombies lumber around, Woods's own mother, a small, ferocious stump, declares that she is "very hurt and angry" at her son, who appears to be following in his father's footsteps.
His endorsements are drying up left and right because we, of course, buy TAG Heuer watches to celebrate our sexual morality, and men shave their backs with Gillette razors self-righteously.
Amid all this, some sports journalists are ecstatic. One Montreal-based writer, who, of course, was "never" a fan, has railed about Woods's anger on the course - his "swearing," his "dirty, leering jokes." He called Woods an "arrogant brat … whose life is built around greed and a ruthless, monomaniacal obsession with winning."
What? Woods is a man, not a child. And athletes, like fans, are often vexed by losing, and generally try to win. Should Woods have been obsessed with mediocrity instead?
And yes, at least some of the hullabaloo around Woods involves racism: Look at the vox populi 's assessment on YouTube, and come away feeling like you just left a Klan-bake.
A lot of the stories about Woods include a picture showing him crying, as if he is crying now. In fact, they are pictures from his 2006 British Open win, right after the death of his father. He played through his pain, because he is a perfect athlete.