Here’s the thing: He planned it. The win, the baby, the half year off. Probably in that order, too. And I don’t mean that he was gambling on the knee holding up and then won, or that he underestimated the pain and then won anyway. And I don’t mean that Tiger hoped he would win the U. S. Open. He planned it. He wrote an opera, right there in front of our fat Father’s Day faces. The guy Day-Timered the most contested individual event in sports. Sunday: Roll in a twenty-footer to gut Mediate. Monday: Win eighteen-hole playoff. Tuesday: Meet the press, discuss the "drama." Wednesday: Announce surgery. Thursday: No food after 7:00 p.m.! Friday: Hospital. Bring Atlas Shrugged to read in recovery.He was working to plan. That shit is hard. Return at the Masters? Planned. And he will win. There is nothing left for us to be staggered by. But most of all — understand this — there is nothing left to hope for. Tiger Woods is the opposite of hope, and it’s one of the things that distances him from us. If there is one thing that any audience always wants, it is this: They want to feel. They want to hurt. An audience demands the possibility of disappointment.
Hope? Hope is for those who might fail. Hope is for Obama. Hence the poster. Hence the prayers. That’s Obama’s audience at work; that’s the industry of hope.
There seems in Tiger a desire to be a little bit of a lout, but I have never seen him give anything but a half laugh. Even when he really goes at it, when he really tries to relax, it feels like a pose. It’s got to be tough to be thirty-three and have people question your ability to laugh. But he won’t show that side of himself, because that would risk the appearance of vulnerability. It’s not because he thinks it’s inappropriate but because that side of him is a distraction. He never forgets distractions, just as he never forgives detractors.
If I’m one-third right, and maybe I’m not, odds are he’ll end up like that old PGA guard — dried-up, irrelevant dicks, prowling the fringes of real power on the flagstone terraces of a hundred clubs, a guy who never once really worried in his life — dismissive of hunger, pain, true injustice, obsessed only with how much gets taken from him — taxes, celebrity, fame. It’s too bad because he seems a thoughtful guy, and if you’re ever going to start testing the muscle of empathy, it’s when you have a baby, a child. But there’s no empathy in him. None. Can’t be. There is no empathy without hope, and there is no hope in Tiger. None. Can’t be. With him, there is only will.
Make no mistake: Tiger is different from the rest. I suspect that he sees colors the rest of us don’t know about, that he senses patterns of heat in the grass, electromagnetism in the earth at his feet. The guy bends the world to his will. This makes him feel alien and repellent to the rest of us. Fine by me. I still cannot take my eyes off him.
He is a story, an undeniable narrative, willfully unfolding. If he doesn’t matter, then sports don’t matter. If he doesn’t matter, storytelling doesn’t. Tiger’s our Napoleon, our surly Gilgamesh, our Odysseus at midsail. He will act, the world will obey. And when his bones finally wash up on the beach, we will pick at them and talk about how he planned it all, right from the start.
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