Tiger, you made a mess of your greatness
My friend has grown weary of the Tiger tale. He's weary of how everybody from the media to the paparazzi to people who don't know golf from Ping-Pong has obsessed over the world's greatest golfer.
He's unwilling, of course, to pardon Tiger's adultery. How could he? He himself is a person of principles, and his principles don't brook behavior of Tiger's kind. Yet my friend has weighed in his mind what his conduct might have been had he been, well ... the world's greatest golfer.
He offers no answer.
"I wish I could pull into town and have 50 women outside my hotel wanting to do anything I wanted them to do," my friend tells me. "The women - the women you dream about having when you were in high school -- they're everywhere."
When you're the world's greatest golfer, these women are everywhere. They are everywhere when you're the world's greatest basketball player or the world's greatest sprinter or the world's greatest cyclist or the world's greatest violinist. The women show up in all the places where a so-called "great" man goes, my friend says.
They have no qualms about a man's marital status or a man's sexual appetite. They will sate that appetite for him - and do whatever else a man might want women to do, my friend says.
But he stops himself in mid-rant.
Collecting his thoughts, he says he can't blame the women alone. He knows that as well as any man who has had his share of women without the tag of "greatest" anything attached to his name. Not that my friend sees the women as blameless, because sexual encounters are like the tango: It takes two.
When does a married man display the testicular fortitude to walk away from an easy piece of booty? he asks. When does a married man let his principles, his spirituality, his commitment to one woman trump his drive to bed all the women who throw their taut bodies at him?
It's hard to walk away from those women, my friend says. They are so tempting, so flirtatious and so accommodating. The women play to a man's ego, and even the greatest golfer in the world can't resist them. They test him in ways that 18 holes of Augusta National simply can't do.
For Augusta doesn't measure a man's moral resolve; it doesn't push him to reject the values his parents instilled in him. Augusta might test his mental strength and his nerve in the face of tension; Augusta National doesn't bring into question his moral underpinnings, however.
Those aren't forged on the undulating greens of some hallowed golf course, for greatness in golf offers no insights into what lies inside a man, even when he's the greatest golfer in the world.
Such insights come from what the greatest golfer in the world does outside those manicured greens - around his children, his cousins, his friends; around the adoring fans and autograph-seekers; around the media and the madness; around the women and the men who want what he should be strong enough not to give them: pieces of himself that belong to someone else.
It takes a lot more than greatness to resist such temptation, my friend says. It takes an inner strength; it takes principles. Those traits aren't bought with U.S. dollars - no matter how many millions a man has in his bank account.
A great man ought to stand for something of substance, shouldn't he?
He ought to be more than the greatest golfer in the world, a title too superficial to take seriously. A man ought to be more than a global icon, some tangible product for sale to whoever pays the most.
He ought to be morally strong; he ought to be a steadfast husband, a father, a brother, a friend to people who have a bigger stake in his life than the sexy women who chase him for sport.
The women never wanted him in life, just what came with his greatness: perks, the flashy lifestyle and the steamy, clandestine sex. They can have those tiny pieces of him - those women of the late nights. They can never have all of him, and he can never have all of them, not in a real sense.
And if he couldn't have all of them, he had none of them. For if he did, he would have had their silence. His sexual escapades, while embarrassing and disturbing to his private life, would not have exploded into a tabloid tale that wrecked his public persona.
While his greatness as a golfer remains unaffected, his reputation beyond that title looks as if he shot 10-over par for nine holes - everything out of control. Where were his paramours to lean on?
Where is he now - the world's greatest golfer? Can he like what this round of his life has turned into? Or was his life always this way - a mess? He can only blame himself, really.
"It's how you're conditioned along the way," says my friend in one of his "Dr. Phil" moment. "It's nobody else's fault, just his."
