Tiger Again

Tiger Woods won The Masters on Sunday. Again. His 5th. 

In November of ’09, Tiger Woods’ then-wife, Elin, decided to detail his freshly crashed SUV – and by some reports, his face – with a 9-iron. (The PR statement said that she was doing it to free him from the vehicle, but further more reports implied that she regretted her club choice and wished she would’ve gone with a longer iron or driver.) There he was, caught with text messages from mistresses, in a crumpled truck, a mangled marriage, and a crushed career. With a scandal of rampant infidelities, Tiger endeavored to redefine golf – never seen as a ‘sexy’ sport – as the sexiest sport for all the wrong reasons. 

Some friends and I absorbed the news. It hit me. I didn’t think he’d win another major. I felt a slow implosion in him. I told those friends. Their response was an eyeroll, a snort, and a shrug. But he’s barely in his mid-30s, he’s #2 in the world, he’s in tremendous shape. Those were the arguments. My projection was perceived as audacious, to wish this man an Icarusesque descent from his trajectory to inevitably be the best golfer to ever play. But I had no such wish or agenda. No desire for comeuppance or justice for this person I didn’t know in anything close to a first-hand way. I said it with sadness and emotional distance. I sensed a rupture inside him. A deflation of the persona, if not the person. For a while, I’d simply been observing.

There had been bumps, body-punches that seemed to affect him. Maybe not as much his game as his posture between shots, different movement in his eyes, and inadvertent reactions to shots would be his tell. Subtle at first. Back problems began surfacing in about 2010 – issues that had been warned about because of the torque in his swing. He gradually got to the point in about by the early-teens where he looked like he was navigating the course with 30 extra years, sore feet, and raging hemorrhoids. 

The first blow was his father’s death in 2006. With my own father passing a year previous – almost to the day – I had a sense of the soul-loss. The thought of my dad’s death had been huddled in an abandoned, dark space of my consciousness behind a curious, foreboding door, where slept an unimaginable event for most father’s kids. For what Tiger’s dad meant to him, I had a vague but fresh idea of the effect.

The second punch was Y.E. Yang, a then-one-time tour winner, who had the walnuts, obliviousness, or stability to be paired with Tiger in the last round of the 2009 PGA Championship, to not back down, and send Tiger home. This PGA loss was especially shocking, set up by Tiger’s return from winning the ’08 US Open with follow-up surgery to prove that the physical world was no limitation.

So when the third bump came in a tree, his wife, his burgeoning enjoyment of pharmaceuticals, and his ‘sex addiction’ colliding with his manicured career, I imagined a snap – the small pop in a major tree limb just before giving way.
His subsequent vacant, stiff television confession made it more evident.
His mouth moved 

and sound came out 

with as much animation as an old AP ticker spitting out text.
A void of anything genuine.
Expecting the acting performance of a lifetime from a complete non-actor under that ridicule and judgment is sure death. And this was that. If the eyes are the window to the soul, Tiger’s qi had clearly stumbled, crawled, snuck out the backstage door, and had the limo run over his head.    

But to circle back, my full prediction to friends after the ’09’s Mistressgate was, “I don’t think he’ll win another major – until and unless he crashes, burns, hits bottom, and transforms.” And I meant transform, as in become someone completely other. Where people hit bottom, much less recognize it is anyone’s guess. This scandal could’ve been argued as a bottom. But those people would be whistling and looking away from the abyss that swallows lives. 

I’m a fan of ‘story’ – everything from the structure, to our need for it to explain our humanity, to its role in everything we do, to it being the only real way we learn, whether through seeing it or living it. And here, in Tiger, we had a doozy. In simplified story structure, the hero experiences transformation only after there is an effort to climb out of her predicament through the usual ways, lose, crash and burn, experience a ‘dark night of the soul’, and surrender. The surrender may seem like giving up, but is the required shedding of the persona and method that resulted in the crash. The stubbornness of persistence, resolve, and not quitting has gotten wonderful press. But it actually can be the thing that keeps us stuck, unable to overcome ourselves. It’s only after that surrender – the story of Christ’s death and resurrection being one of the most well-known allegories – that transformation is possible. The character changes in spirit, an inner transformation, which, if we’re truthful, is the seminal and only real transformation. All else is just a resulting costume change.  

Then again.
Tiger was destined for his disaster as much as becoming a world-class golfer. He grew up a prodigy, sheltered and weaned in atypical ways. It was a fraught upbringing. The lifestyle his father, Earl, modeled was apparently short on human relationship tools and long on overt promiscuity. But Earl did his best, he passed along what he knew, for better and worse. Since he was a toddler, Tiger was told he was special, that he was the best, and was taught to cultivate that psychology. It worked. It was his weapon. And his Achilles heel.
 
What’s perhaps been more fascinating is that some people I know think he doesn’t deserve a rebirth. They wave away Tiger’s comeback because he’s a billionaire overcoming self-inflicted destruction. I can almost hear them subconsciously simmer… 
How dare Tiger not deteriorate into a O.J.-esque sack of plasma and fade away so we can enjoy another epic downfall to keep our cynicism intact and the belief that we are subjects of our fate and lot. Fuck – can I not just eat my pint of ice cream on the couch and soothe myself?

And I get a part of it. I’m not feeling redemption here. I’d thought the loss of his game might be karmic balance. After all, he wasn’t Ben Hogan, who’d been plowed into by a bus, saving himself from the fatal crush of a steering wheel by throwing himself over his wife to save her, then deemed unable to walk again by doctors to not only walk, but play as a pro and win. Or Ali who missed years of his prime because of moral and political convictions. While their struggles were epic and moral, it’s no less tragic and defeating for us to create our own proverbial bus to throw ourselves under. In a way, Tiger’s demise is more the stuff of mythology; gods whose characteristics – and the shadow of their positive traits – become their downfall. And that self-inflicted spiral brings its own spiral of shame, perhaps the most insidiously crushing monster of all. 

Now we’ve entered Mythology-plus. This, with the fortune of modern surgical medicine, feels like Icarus sprouting new wings, or a bloated and batshit OJ rehabbing to score a Super Bowl game-winning touchdown. 

Yeah, imagine that.
To top it off, the crushing shame spiral was something Tiger overcame as one of the most famous people in a world of unprecedented and unhindered public exposure. Sorry, but none of us can imagine that.  

However, with any of this is the disclaimer that I’m going with what we know now. I don’t have the full story. It’s not over or complete. (For instance, I hope that the tablet that the cameras caught him washing down on he 17th tee was a multi-vitamin.) And, like any of us, Tiger is a work in progress and not a happily-ever-after done deal.
It continues.
It morphs.
More potholes.
But more interesting to me than the story is our collective and individual reactions to that story.

Our cultural treatment of icons, heroes, and gods is that they’re disproportionately revered until we realize they’re flawed, to be summarily discarded. Sadly, we don’t see them as anything connected to us – hearts and bones, 

broken, 

beaten, 

forgotten, 

exhausted.  

But they become an entity that can then transform.
That disconnect has us believe that the relic of mythology and its function is to simply entertain us, amuse us, not teach us. 
In their fall, they actually become something beyond gods or heroes: Human. They become real. Two and a half years earlier, Tiger was regularly duffing chip shots – equivalent to Yo-Yo Ma confused on how to hold his bow, or Lance Armstrong unable to balance on a bike. 

In this way, Tiger needn’t win 4 or 5 majors – or even one more – to show who he possibly and hopefully is: Someone remarkable, a different type of remarkable than what we’d witnessed, and more than the boy who owned a sport as fickle and elusive as golf.

Up until now, he was a phenomenon, beyond human. But now, by being human and rising not from it but with it, he has changed our image of him – or at least our previous image of him that was a long way from truth. To walk away impressed by his win is shortchanging ourselves. That result is only the evidence of the more remarkable task: the super-humanly human project of his internal universe changing.
I’m thinking that might be the case, using golf for verification. In my experience, golf is the litmus test.
Golf doesn’t lie.
And neither is golf inclined to be kind.
Tiger knows this better than anyone.