Sense and Sensibility

Tiger Woods, Cassius and the Mice That Roared

Few contortions are as delicious to watch as the American media trying to be virtuous and bawdy at the same time.

Lots of eggheads and nutty professors have inveighed against the fertile hunt for Tiger dung, but their admonitions were almost as futile as they were ridiculous. No blogger worth his Google hits is going to back down on a story that gets more sordid by the nanosecond. And we are at a lamentable point in journalistic history when the high-minded can no longer ignore the titillation of the low.

That cat has been out of the bag since the O.J. Simpson trial. 

But ever since Tiger Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant, news hounds have been pruriently sniffing about Tiger’s private cage, all the while jawing about the public’s right to know versus the individual’s right to privacy. It’s not even a fair fight. This Tiger tale is so frisky, you would have to be comatose not to have your sleaze impulse kick in.

Mr. and Mrs. Woods

The principled among us would insist the Tiger Woods story is a private skirmish to be sneered at and summarily dismissed as the personal donnybrook of a public couple. The problem with that principled stand is that it ignores cultural shifts over the past 100 years that have turned celebrities, athletes and politicians into avatars of morality. It hasn’t been the wisest calibration in human history, but it is undeniable.

In the absence of celestial deities like Pan or Venus, we’ve got Eliot Spitzer and Tom Cruise, Mark Sanford and Tiger Woods. They are not, thankfully, immortal, but they are ubiquitous enough to be moral and cultural touchstones. And yes, with apologies to Cassius, the fault “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Still, dismantling this pantheon gets harder by the day.

Eliot Spitzer

How hard? Well, so hard that Ashley Dupre, Spitzer’s pricey call girl, was giving morality lessons in the pages of the New York Post that actually made a strange kind of sense: “Here you have all these girls accepting gifts, money, trips from Tiger in exchange for sex [--] all the while knowing he is married,” she said. “And now they all can’t wait to tell their stories in exchange for even more money from the tabloids? And I was the hooker? At least I kept my mouth shut.”

Yes, it’s always good to consult a professional.

When these heartwarming fables were rent asunder by caddish behavior so loathsome as to be cliché, you could almost feel the dejection from women, in particular, who wanted to believe the myth.

Fame follows success but it also loves a good story. The public affection Kobe Bryant felt before the fall wasn’t just because he could dunk better than anybody else in the NBA; it was because of his storybook romance with his (eventually wronged) wife.

So, too, with John Edwards. It wasn’t just the megawatt smile, $400 haircut, 102-acre estate and, oh, yeah, a few well-articulated talking points; it was because he was perceived as a man who stood by his woman in the most agonizing of times [--] through the death of a child and his wife’s breast cancer treatment.

And that, of course, is the problem, isn’t it? We want to believe the myth.

And why shouldn’t we? This is a country in which nearly half of all marriages fail. With such lousy odds, who can blame us for believing that a tall, handsome professional golfer could marry a beautiful Nordic princess, produce two children and live happily ever after?And yet Tiger Woods, who had seemed one-dimensional to the point of asceticism, turns out to be (surprise!) just as priapic as all those other jocks. Lots of women, if you believe their reports, have had a little Tiger in their tank and are only happy to roar about their exploits.

This only goes to prove what your mother told you that a woman who would cheat with a married man is probably not the sort with whom one should entrust state secrets.

For women, the Tiger revelations smacked of the whole Christie Brinkley divorce again. If a woman as stunning as Elin Nordegren Woods could not keep her Tiger on a leash, what could the rest of us hope for? Consider: American women spend $9 billion a year on cosmetics. In 2004, nearly 12 million surgical and nonsurgical beauty procedures were performed in the United States [--] including 290,343 eyelid jobs, 166,187 nose jobs, 478,251 liposuctions and 334,052 breast augmentations. The price tag? More than $14 billion. That’s how desperate American women are to stay young, pretty and trim [--] like Elin Nordegren.

For men, most of whom could only dream of capturing a sylph like Nordegren, Tiger’s trysts put him somewhere between the luckiest guy on earth or an ungrateful schmuck who doesn’t realize what he’s got until he’s lost it.