When Tiger Woods appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in February, the specially commissioned photographs were designed to celebrate the exaggerated pectorals and biceps of his imposing physique. It is easy to forget that when he still resembled an ordinary human being, long before he started working out with such obsessive diligence, he was already the best golfer in the world, by some distance.
Sure, being relatively fit is a help, even to a golfer. Lee Westwood, once a tub of lard, is the first to say so. But it is not obligatory, as Ángel Cabrera demonstrated when he won last year’s Masters. Woods may have told himself that he was adding muscle to hit the ball further but his transformation was primarily about narcissism, which may give some clue to the events that have overtaken his career in the past few months.
The experience of having tens of millions of dollars thrown at you every year since adolescence, is in itself, a formula for character distortion. Being told that you are “the greatest sportsman of all time” — which appeared again last week, published in what purported to be a sober appraisal of his current circumstances — might exert an even more insidiously damaging effect.
I don’t buy that “greatest sportsman” line. At its pinnacle the game of golf is undoubtedly rich in skill and subtlety, but if comparisons have to be made then I find it hard to believe that what Woods does amounts to as much as taking a century off the West Indies pace quartet in the 1980s, or facing Serena Williams at her best, or dribbling through the entire Real Zaragossa defence the way Lionel Messi did two weeks ago, his brain working like a miniaturised supercomputer as it recalculated parameters of time, space and touch.
But golf happens to be the game favoured by powerful men and Woods’s prowess opened the door to privileges of which he was encouraged to take full advantage. So now he is back in the pages of Vanity Fair once again, this time being discussed in intimate detail by four of the women with whom he has had recent relationships and who are also pictured in glamour-model poses, one of them naked on a hotel bed.
The investigation appears in an edition of the magazine which carries more than 300 photographs of white people, many of them large, against two-dozen images, almost all of them small, of people of colour, who are either entertainers, sportsmen and women, or Barack Obama. And, perhaps perversely, the images of Woods’s “inconvenient women”, as Vanity Fair calls them, and the accompanying story, made me look at the beleaguered champion not exactly with greater sympathy but at least with increased understanding.
In passing the writer reminds us that on Woods’s first day at an otherwise all-white kindergarten in California he was tied to a tree by older children, who spray-painted the word “nigger” on him and threw stones at him. You absorb that, and you glance at the photographs of the mostly blonde women, and read the stories of how he was ushered through the secret doorway to the extreme privileges inaccessible to all but the highest of high rollers during his trips to Las Vegas with Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, and although you certainly acknowledge the pleasure he must have taken from lots of sex with women who made no demands, you wonder what else might have been going on in the depths of his subconscious mind, in terms of revenge and restitution.
There is a lot to dislike about Woods’s recent behaviour. His scripted confession, a mixture of base-covering and false notes, raised more questions than it answered. This week in Augusta he will show us whether those weeks in therapy have made a real difference, or whether that sense of entitlement, built on a foundation of ancient but unspent humiliation, is still the platform upon which he stands and swings. —