Tiger Woods’s Golf Lesson

Nicolaus Mills on Tiger Woods

LIKE SOUTH Carolina governor Mark Sanford, former president Bill Clinton, and former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, golfing great Tiger Woods–the winner of fifty-six professional golf tournaments from 2000 to 2009–has become a charter member of the Celebrity Adulterer’s Club. His decision to hold a televised news conference apologizing for his transgressions is a familiar one, and in the conference, Woods–whose wife was not in the room with him–made a point of offering no excuses. “I convinced myself that the rules did not apply,” he declared. “I have a lot to atone for.”

But the question is, Will Woods’s apology at the Professional Golfers Association Tour complex in Ponte Verda Beach, Florida be enough to get him back in the good graces of the public and golf fans?

Since the Woods sex scandal broke last November 27 following a late-night crash of his Cadillac Escalade, pictures of Woods have been everywhere. He posed bare-chested and in a knit watch cap for an Annie Leibovitz photo-spread in the February Vanity Fair, and he and the women he slept with dominated the New York Post’s front page for more than three straight weeks following his car accident. The result is that since the car accident the publicity generated about Woods (he was reportedly undergoing treatment for sex addiction at a Mississippi rehabilitation center) has only made his situation worse.

The women Woods is accused of having affairs with have also protracted the scandal as they vie for the spotlight. One of them, the porn star Veronica Siwik-Daniels, has even asked that Woods apologize to her by name. “Veronica has made tremendous sacrifices for him,” her lawyer, famed California attorney Gloria Allred, told the press on Thursday. “She gave up the porn business at his request and went into hiding when the scandal broke in order to protect him.”

In contrast to baseball stars Mark McGwire and Alex Rodriguez, whose use of steroids improved their performances as athletes, Woods has never done anything that gave him an advantage over his competitors, and as someone who was never elected to public office, he did not betray voters’ trust. Perhaps, he therefore expected leeway from the public and the media.

But just the opposite has been the case with Woods. Nobody has cut him slack. The left has not given him an inch. In the New York Times liberal columnist Frank Rich called Woods a con man and compared his failings to those of the executives who ran Enron and Citigroup. In the Nation, he was denounced for his commercial relationships with Chevron and the developers of a golf course in the Philippines.

The right has been even harsher on Woods. His corporate sponsors, who paid him over $100 million annually for endorsements, have been pulling away from him in droves. From their perspective–and that of the middle-aged white audience they are out to capture–Woods’s sexual infidelities are particularly troubling. He has undermined the image the business world thought it was paying for–that of a sports figure in such perfect control of his life that he was able to shut out all other influences that might get in the way of his success. Instead, what Woods’s adultery has revealed is a complicated superstar able to succeed at the highest levels of competition while juggling an array of trysts and deceptions that would have left lesser men exhausted.

The special anger of Woods’s corporate sponsors is easy to understand. Woods’s deceptions help remind Americans of the degree to which the business world’s shoddy practices, for which it has never apologized, lie behind the Great Recession. But for the rest of us, especially the parents of young children, there is a positive—and counterintuitive—lesson to take from the Woods sex scandal: you don’t have to be
obsessive to get ahead.

Woods’s real problem is that his infidelities have hurt his wife, Elin Nordegren, and their two young children. The irony is that had his outside interests been positive ones–charity work, crossword puzzles, gardening–there is no telling how much greater Woods’s professional success might have been and how many more fans (television ratings are 93 percent higher for golf tournaments in which Woods plays) he might have gained as the epitome of the well-rounded man.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-editor with Michael Walzer of Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press). Homepage photo: Keith Allison / Creative Commons 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons; feature photo: Dan Perry / Creative Commons 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons.