A new standard for poor
Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:44PM 
Old iron.At my wedding in 1979 I gained a husband ... and an awareness of golf.
During the first winter of our marriage, I was a newly expectant mother. On arctic Midwestern Sunday afternoons, following church and dinner, TG would snooze on the couch while I sat in the big rocker, struggling to stay awake as the cultured voice-over stage-whispered live action at a televised PGA tournament.
I was mesmerized by the conspiratorial tones of the announcers as much as by images of balmy-breezed manicured fairways in parts of the world where the temperature never gets below fifty, much less below zero.
TG rarely gets a chance to play anymore, but he dearly loves the game of golf. He watches the tour ardently, and I've seen tears mist his eyes when he hears the poignant Masters music each April.
During the '80s, when we still lived in the metropolitan Chicago area, TG treated me to the Western Open in Oak Brook, Illinois.
All I remember about that day is that my outfit was cute, and we followed Morris Hatalsky around Butler National. I picked Morris because I liked his outfit (the pants were purple), and we couldn't get close to the bona fide "greats" like Toms Kite, Watson, and Weiskopf.
He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man.
Oh -- and I remember that it rained so hard, they stopped play and we had to stand under a tent with about 200 other drowned rats, with water up to our ankles. My sandals were ruined, not to mention my hair, and let's not even talk about my mood.
But I do love to livery a golf cart on a beautiful course on a day when it's neither raining, humid, nor over 80 degrees, and watch my man hit one into the trees onto the green.
The estimable Tiger Woods having brought golf painfully to the fore (I'm not sorry) in recent days, I've been thinking.
Nike, one of his mega-million-dollar sponsors, has declared it wouldn't even consider backing away from the besmirched Tiger -- calling his "infidelities" nothing but a blip on the radar.
Gross immorality, chronic adultery, and all-around degeneracy a blip on the radar?
Now, before anyone goes all righteous on me and wags "He who is without sin, cast the first stone," let me say that I am not judging Tiger.
Sin is sin is sin, and we all sin, and we all need to repent, and we all need forgiveness.
But what if, instead of cheating on his wife times a number known only to the Almighty and generally being several food-chain links below pond scum, the news had broken that Tiger Woods keeps a starving mommy dog and her two bony puppies chained in the dark bowels of his mansion, and that just for fun every night he goes down there and blisters their paw pads with the tip of a great big cigar?
Or if he'd been caught on tape driving his Nike SasQuatch 460 into the bewildered pea-sized brain of a pesky groundhog on his palatial estate?
I bet in that eventuality Nike would have dropped Tiger faster than Obama dropped Reverend Wright.
In a sponsor's eyes, it's "barely a blip" when a celebrity emotionally abuses his wife and children -- provided that his name attached to a product or sport catapults that product or sport into the economic stratosphere.
But by denying them his devotion and fidelity (and only God knows what else), Tiger has deprived his wife and kids of nourishment as surely as if he'd padlocked the pantry in his 3,000-square-foot kitchen.
And if Mrs. Woods is a normal woman (no comment), I believe she would prefer the occasional cigar burn to the pain she has felt in her marriage.
As long as the cigar burns did not mar her beautiful ex-model face.
He may be worth a billion dollars, but Tiger Woods is an impoverished man. I don't feel sorry for him or Elin (well, maybe a little bit for Elin) -- they willingly made their choices -- but my heart aches for Samantha and Charlie.
They will always be rich but they will never have a whole and happy family.
They never had a dad who loved their mom enough to be faithful to the vows he took.
That old saying, that the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother?
It's true.
Reader Comments (2)
I never got into golf (a baseball coach during my youth once warned us players that golf was an evil sport that would mess up our swings if we partook in it, and being a devoted baseball pupil I took him at his word), but it pains me to see such a distinguished sport become tarnished because of the actions of one selfish, immoral man.
Golf was one sport that seemed pure. It, more or less, always avoided controversy. Baseball, college and professional, college and professional basketball, track and field, even figure skating (I'm looking at you, Tonya Harding) have black marks.
But golf was different. At golf tournaments, fans are dignified and respectful. They let the athletes compete in silence. They don't boo. They cheer. The golfers don't showboat. In football, a player will do a dance after making a meaningless tackle in a game where his team is losing by three touchdowns. In baseball, guys pose for the cameras after hitting meaningless homeruns. But golfers, golfers are different.
Anyway, you make a great point, Jenny. If Tiger Woods had been caught abusing puppies or the like, every single one of his sponsors would drop him like a hot potato and the authorities would do their best to put him behind bars.
But since "all" he has done is cheat on his wife (repeatedly), destroy his family, doom his children to grow up in a fractured home, tarnish his sport, and take a leave of absence from said sport (a decision that will cost others millions in lost revenue), he has entities like Nike standing by his side.
Madness.
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