Column

The revelations about the sex life of golfer Tiger Woods, which have dominated the media over the last week, are both awful and exciting. Let us be honest here. We all enjoy gossip and when the gossip involves a celebrity, why, it makes our coffee break conversation that much more enjoyable. Us humans like our little doses of sleaze and salaciousness. It panders to our “I’m all right, Jack” sense of smugness that separates us from the poor sod currently facing the Inquisition.

The moralists will tell you that our inner Torquemada is bound to get its comeuppance one day and that our pettiness will rebound on us. Perhaps, there is a larger collective conscience at work which ensures that what goes round comes round and a rightful order finally prevails. But for the moment, the current victim with his head in the stocks is Tiger Woods, world’s greatest golfer, husband, father of two and by most accounts, something of a sex maniac. We are enjoying this public pillorying, this auto-de-fe.

And yet, what exactly is Tiger Woods’s crime? That he cheated on his wife? For which are we to burn most of the human race at the stake? That he pretended to be all goodie-goodie but turned out to be oh-so-bad? More fool us for forgetting about human nature.

That people spent their money on shoes and shaving gear from large multinational corporations because Woods endorsed them? Stack up one more victory for the PT Barnum principle: there’s a sucker born every minute.

The fact is, the big problem is between his family and him. Yes, what he did was to break the faith but somehow what we are doing to Woods and his family is almost as bad. As far as his faith with the public is concerned, it has to do with his game of golf. Has Woods been accused of picking a golf ball and slipping it into a hole when he shouldn’t have? (I gather that would be a terrible misdemeanour in golf.) No. Has he been accused of fudging his handicap? No. He remains the world’s best golfer, with 14 major titles and an expertise that fills golf aficionados with awe.

In which light, surely the shock of his little episodes of “transgression” belongs to a realm which says ‘let him who has no sin cast the first stone’? Woods is not a politician who had promised to bring about a return to morality and was suddenly caught with his pants down. His reticence may have been mistaken or interpreted as cleanliness, but that is surely the problem of the interpreter.

The question is double fold: do we ask too much of our public figures — more than we ask of ourselves — and how much intrusion into private life is fair game? I cannot blame the media here because I know from experience that if the public wasn’t interested, the media would not do it. Does it go overboard now and then? Sure, but that’s an error of judgment not a complete misreading of public sentiment.

In the case of Woods, it certainly seems that this full-scale public vilification and humiliation does not fit the crime. He may have lost his marriage, he has jeopardised his children’s wellbeing and he has suffered a severe loss of public face. He cannot redeem himself on the golf course because there is no golf to be played at this time. And now, all the inner details of his taste in women (white and somewhat removed from high society), his sexual prowess (whatever), his text message style (mundane), his need to record his sexcapades (childish) and his lack of interest in black issues (an expectation perhaps beyond his means) are out there for us to salivate over.

Somehow, it seems that it is time for this circus to pull down its tent and move on to the next town. There is almost nothing more about Woods that is left for us to destroy, unless he has truly abandoned birdies for the birds. In which case, he can retire with a bogey, a sad victim of the vicious glare of public opinion.