I have to write about Tiger Woods.
At the risk of being all pop culturey and doing what everyone else is doing, from Jay Leno to every person at every Christmas party this week, I have something to say to Tiger and all men of Earth with the sole exception of Ronnie Howard.
Is it that difficult?
Really, is it that hard to get up every morning and go to your most excellent job, a job that is a dream-that-will-never-come-true-not-even-in-heaven for the average person, do what you love and what you’re good at, come home to one of your mansions, kiss your beautiful, blonde Swedish wife, play with your adorable children, do what ever the flip you want to do because you’re Tiger Woods – is it that hard to do all that without screwing your waitress?
Really? Because I would think it would be pretty easy to take a pass on that.
Tiger’s a smart guy, so you can’t chalk this up to being a stupid redneck who is so goshdarn surprised to see himself in a position of being King that he lost himself in the moment. Moments. Years.
And I refuse to believe the E! Hollywood psychologist’s version of an explanation, that if you throw enough money at anybody, they’ll misbehave.
Not true. There are plenty of rich and famous people who don’t cheat on their wives. At least until the next seemingly wholesome nice guy screws up and proves me wrong. As sad as I was that Patrick Swayze died, I was grateful that he made it all the way through a celebrity life without publicly dishonoring his marriage. It’s a rarity.
You think you know men and you think you can give the famous ones the benefit of the doubt (you know, innocent until on the cover of The National Enquirer) and then they pull a Jon-Minus-Eight-Equals-Hate and you have to put them in a big celebrity Time Out. And the Time Out corner is gettin’ pretty crowded.
A friend of mine summed it up years ago when Hugh Grant, who was dating model Elizabeth Hurley, got caught with a skanky prostitute. “If you’re cheating with prostitutes when you have Elizabeth Hurley, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
I don’t want to get into a debate over whether Tiger Woods should take a break from golf, whether we have the right to give him a good spanking just because he’s famous, or whether he should have the bajillions of dollars in endorsement paychecks taken away from him. And I certainly don’t want to wade into the waters of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is chastising Tiger for cheating on his white wife with white women. (It seems the Rev. is upset that it’s the white women who get the big tabloid money for their stories. If he was a real brother, Sharpton says, he’d have chosen a couple of black mistresses. I guess it doesn’t count that Hugh Grant’s tryst was with a black woman, balancing out the score a little bit.)
I just am disappointed once again that someone I respected on a personal level turned out to be just another skirt-chaser without regard to doing the right thing. So I’ll put Tiger in the Time Out corner with the others and just be glad he didn’t run for public office first.