In those days, though, journalists, and sports journalists especially, tended to protect those they wrote about. Woods has had the misfortune to come of age at a time when the public appetite for details about the private lives of celebrities is apparently insatiable. Had any other resident of Windermere, Fla., crashed his sport utility vehicle into a fire hydrant at 2:25 a.m., it wouldn’t have merited more than a line or two in the local weekly, and maybe a joke about whether the golf club used to smash the back window was a 5-iron or a pitching wedge.
But because Woods was behind the wheel, the incident became worldwide news, and a few tabloid rumors gave rise to such a plague of Internet gossip-mongering that it’s hard not to sympathize with his plea for privacy. Yet, as so many have pointed out, Woods has become a public figure not just in the way that most great athletes are public figures, but also in a way probably unparalleled in the history of publicity itself. He has made far more money from selling himself, or his image, than he has made from playing tournaments. That image, partly genuine and partly sculptured, has been one of decency, modesty, filial devotion and paternal responsibility, and not of mysterious car crashes and evasive explanations.
It also matters to the image that Woods is a golfer and not, say, a football player. N.F.L. players get into these kinds of scrapes all the time and we hardly notice, while pro golfers, to be honest, sometimes seem straight-arrow to the point of blandness. But golf, unlike just about any other sport, is built on honesty and integrity. It’s the only one whose players are expected to call penalties on themselves and whose rules, rather than being something to be worked around, are accorded a kind of Talmudic reverence. When a golfer’s ball moves while he’s trying to hack it out of the rough, he doesn’t privately acknowledge and regret the mishap and move on; he announces it to his opponent. When he whiffs, he doesn’t look around to see if anyone noticed before marking his card appropriately.
Golf is not life, though it sometimes resembles life in its unpredictability and bad bounces. It actually holds participants to a higher standard than life does, penalizing them for infractions that would readily be forgiven in most social transactions, like accidentally signing the wrong scorecard. That’s why golf is one of the rare games that really do build character, or at least reveal it. And it’s why Woods’s behavior, to golf fans, anyway, has been so disappointing. We hold him — or held him — to a higher standard.
At this point, do we really want a detailed laundry list of what he called “transgressions,†whatever they may be? Probably not. But he has yet to offer a convincing account of what really happened in the early morning of Nov. 27. The scorecard is still muddled. Had he owned up then, he might have saved himself a lot of misery, and the rest of us would have had to find something more elevated to talk about.
None of this, let’s hope, will affect his play on the course whenever he tees up next. He will almost certainly remain one of the most thrilling athletes ever. But watching him won’t be quite the same, either. It turns out that the principles of golf, if not the game itself, are so hard, so exacting, that even Tiger Woods can’t live up to them.
