Tiger Woods behaved like a jackass. Agreed?
The guy made a fool of himself, and worse, his poor, mortified wife. Does anyone, including Woods, dispute this fact?
Woods behaved like the worst sort of hound. Nobody need feel sorry for this man. He deserves the repeated kicks in the gut that are still coming. Forgive him or not.
Yet, the more I think about it, there is something rather bizarre about the continued media backlash against Woods. No matter how many apologies, mea culpas and confessional slashed veins Woods offers up, it’s apparently never going to be good enough for some pious sports journalists.
I have to ask: What more can Woods do to satisfy critics who apparently won’t be happy unless he confesses his marital crimes and concedes that he behaved like the worst sort of freakish cad until his dying breath?
So I’m coming around to a dramatically different viewpoint: What Tiger Woods should do now is simply say “the hell with it. I’ve done my apologizing. I’m moving on. Are you?”
No, this doesn’t mean Woods doesn’t have to live with what he did until his dying day. You think Elin Woods will let him forget? The fact is Woods might very well become a perpetual punch line for the rest of his life. I don’t really believe this will happen, but if does, so be it. Woods asked for it.
But this is getting weird. At least with the golf media, all seemed largely forgiven after Woods’ April 5 press conference at Augusta National during Masters week. The World No. 1 answered every question openly, honestly and even added extra doses of humility and humor for dessert. The golf scribes seemed prepared to say Tiger did fine. He answered what he’s going to answer, so let’s play golf and understand we’ll never really know what happened on Thanksgiving night because Woods isn’t going to share.
Would you?
And it sure seemed most media types were ready to move on after Woods shot a dazzling Masters first-round 68. Woods was back on a golf course where he belongs, flashing the occasional smile to a cheering, forgiving Masters gallery. For a brief, fleeting moment there, it sure seemed like the only people Tiger Woods had left to answer to were his wife, young children and his mother.
But then something happened at Augusta National. Woods started to fight his swing. That first-round 68 was followed by frustrating second and third round 2-under 70s. Woods became flustered. Woods got mad. He said an unfortunate word or two before finishing with a remarkable 3-under-69 during a final Masters Sunday round when he had no clue.
But come on – did anyone really believe Woods could alter his emotional personality overnight? The answer is, apparently and strangely, yeah.
So after the moral police popped up unexpectedly during Masters weekend, it’s now clear that Woods is going to have to let time do the moving forward. There are those – CBS’ new morals judge Jim Nantz for instance – who expect the volatile Woods to transform that alter-competitive personality into another smiling, happy-go-lucky Phil Mickelson.
That temper? Get rid of it now.
The swearing? Stop it immediately.
And don’t you dare, Tiger Woods, think about throwing a club in the air.
Jeez – you think the guy had committed a felony.
In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. CBS, the Golf Channel’s normally sober Rich Lerner and scattering of golf columnists (Mike Lupica, John Feinstein) couldn’t wait to dig up those old, tired and cliched competitive and personality contrasts between Woods and Mickelson. You know them:
The scowler vs. the smiler.
Good vs. evil.
And the new one: Philander vs. family man.
Don’t get me wrong. Mickelson isn’t at fault here. He didn’t dream up the family guy winner vs. the hound-dog loser comparisons Nantz and some golf columnists regrettably surrendered to after Mickelson’s big-time 5-under, bogey free final round gave him his third green jacket.
Confession here: I’ve never been a big Mickelson guy.
Lord knows, outside of Woods, there hasn’t been a greater pure golfing talent than old Lefty. But what annoys me about Mickelson is the young Andre Agassi element infecting his golfing personality. That is, like Agassi, Mickelson stubbornly committed himself to the “I’m going to do it my way” approach to a game that is all about percentages. Like grabbing the driver on the 18th tee at Winged Foot in the 2006 U.S. Open and throwing away a major championship.
And take that incredible shot on No. 13 Sunday afternoon at Augusta. There sat Mickelson’s drive in the pine chips in between two large trees. Mickelson led the Masters by two shots and claimed all the tournament’s momentum with 6 holes to play.
The safe and smart shot for Mickelson was laying up about 140 yards and playing to his excellent wedge game to set up birdie. But Phil, being Phil, decided to take a 6-iron and lash it through the two trees, over the pond guarding the trick 13th green.
Incredible shot! Mickelson’s ball cleared the water by maybe three feet and came to rest some five feet from the hole. What an insane risk. Barely heard a word about it from the CBS gang.
When asked why in the name-of-Greg Norman he didn’t just lay up like any sane golfer, Mickelson couldn’t resist.
“A great shot is when you pull it off. A smart shot is when you don’t have the guts to try it.”
What Mickelson still doesn’t get, one reason why he has 4 majors and Jack Nicklaus has 18 and Woods has 14, is Mickelson didn’t have to pull it off.
What? The guy never heard of risk reward?
That said, Mickelson played one of the greatest final rounds in major golf history. Going bogey free after three hellish par saves at Nos. 9-10-11 will go down in major championship golf lore. Which makes you even shake your head even more at the guy who risked it all with a two-stoke lead in between those trees at No. 13.
Now I, too, was touched by seeing Mickelson’s wife, Amy, hugging her husband after he won the Masters. Amy Mickelson is obviously going through hell in her brave breast cancer fight. It was a sweet, well-earned Masters win for the Mickelson clan.
But that didn’t mean Nantz and others had to turn the tables and pile on all over Woods. Sure, Woods behaved like a jackass and a classic cad heading into Thanksgiving night. The entire world knows that now. But did that provide license for Nantz and Lerner to weave the good family man vs. the evil philanderer tale after Mickelson’s victory? What should have been a completely celebratory moment for the Mickelsons became something inappropriately mean-spirited.
Did Woods really deserve that?
Woods played remarkable golf after a nearly five-month layoff. He was clearly emotionally drained by Sunday while also losing touch with his golf swing. That 3-under 69 he posted with a pair of eagles was a spectacular lesson in golf resiliency.
But what Woods received afterwards wasn’t congrats or well done. No, Woods was “snarky” to CBS’ Peter Costis in an interview after the final round. Feinstein saw more bad Tiger Woods than new Tiger Woods. Gosh, did anybody else notice the guy finished fourth after a five-month layoff?
New York Times Media columnist Richard Sandomir captured the contrasts in this odd plot twist CBS took by turning the Masters final round into a family values story (Family Values Become a Focus at Augusta).
A taste:
Woods had cheated on his wife; Mickelson won for his wife, Amy, who has breast cancer and was in the gallery for the first time this season to watch her husband. Moments after a CBS camera spotted Amy Mickelson beyond the ropes of the 18th green, her husband birdied the 18th hole to win, and his joy turned to tears. CBS’s Jim Nantz echoed his “There it is, a win for the ages” declaration for Woods at the 1997 Masters when he said of Mickelson, “That’s a win for the family.” It sounded scripted yet sounded right. Earlier, David Feherty, the on-course reporter, ad-libbed an even better comment when he noted that the pink ribbon Mickelson wore on his cap was “for his beautiful wife, Amy, and his beautiful mom,” who also received a diagnosis of breast cancer last year.
It’s the easy cliché to fall into and CBS, especially Nantz, fail hard for it. And if this ascent into the moral high ground wasn’t enough, Nantz took it upon himself to take it a step farther as Sandomir duly noted:
On Saturday, he said he was disappointed in Woods’ frustrated outbursts, although most would not call his words very profane. On Sunday, Nantz came off as a scold when he called the language “foul.” Even some of Nantz’s colleagues said Sunday that Woods seemed less himself when he was not exhibiting his emotional side.
This is dangerous territory for Nantz and Woods’ other critics. Woods obviously turned out not to be the man and husband we thought he was before Thanksgiving night. Remember though, there was little, if any, evidence to hint otherwise.
Yet, the same goes for Mickelson, doesn’t it? Is Nantz, who himself is recovering from a very nasty, public divorce, willing to stake his reputation on Mickelson’s private life?
The fact is we didn’t know Tiger Woods. The fact remains we don’t know Phil Mickelson either.
Now Woods can do plenty to repair his reputation. He can play his normal schedule of tournament golf and it wouldn’t kill him to go to a tournament or two he hasn’t play in years or before.
He can smile more.
Improve that body language.
Swear under your breath.
And winning golf tournaments won’t hurt a bit.
Woods’ astonishingly crazy behavior before Thanksgiving night won’t ever be totally forgotten. But it will fade away. That is a fact Jim Nantz might want to keep in mind as he holds Woods to his own new, lofty standards.
Who In The World Listens to Newt Gingrich?
I can remember chuckling back in 1995 when then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich began making trips to New Hampshire to explore the laughable possibility that he might be able to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Remember? Gingrich would go on “Meet the Press” and say he was only going to New Hampshire to see a moose. Funny stuff.
Ah, here we go again. Twelve years after Gingrich was pushed out of the Speaker’s office, some clueless pundits and political reporters are once again talking up Gingrich as a credible 2012 presidential contender.
Yeah – like that might happen!
I don’t get why anybody, even conservative Republicans, bother listening to Gingrich, who is about as relevant as Dan Quayle. Here is “presidential candidate” Gingrich on President Obama’s radical presidency:
The president of the United States - the most radical president in American history – as now thrown down the gauntlet to the American people. He has said “I run a machine, I own Washington, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Now that’s where we are. But I want to remind you as a historian that there are two rules. The first is that elections have consequences, and therefore 2006 and 2008 has a consequence – the consequence is Obama, Pelosi and Reid. However, consequences lead to elections. So here’s my promise – if we will go out and recruit at every level…if we’ll work as hard as we can from now until election day, not giving up a single day, when we win control of the House and Senate this way, stage one of the end of Obamaism will be a new Republican Congress in January that simply refuses to fund any of the radical efforts.
Laughable, really. Now I’m not the only one wondering why anyone pays attention to this guy. Catch The Economist’s Democracy In America column on Gingrich’s Obama is a radical comments (nice catch). Here is a taste:
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen academic credentials put to such hackish ends as Newt Gingrich did today: Really, Mr Gingrich? That’s what your doctoral work on Belgian education policy in the Congo taught you? That Barack Obama is the most radical president in American history and we should vote Republican? The Republican Party’s pell-mell flight from intellectual seriousness is the most worrying problem American party politics faces. It’s not that the two parties have radically different ideas. The median voter of each party is not so distant from the median voter of the other in normal times. The real problem is that a man who considers himself the intellectual heavyweight of the Republican leadership is now willing to say things like the above.
The New Republic’s Jonathon Chait, who spotted The Economist column on Gingrich, asked a question the media should be answering:
On the subject of Gingrich, here’s one thing I don’t understand. John Edwards’ philandering has made him a public pariah, understandably so. But Gingrich’s marital behavior was probably even more disgusting. He cheated on his first wife and told her he wanted a divorce while she was recovering from surgery for cancer. He subsequently cheated on his second wife with a much younger aide. It’s fairly amazing how Gingrich has managed to avoid any stigma from this. He’s just a conservative “ideas guy.”
Guess What? All Those Federal Bailouts Are Working
It seems like forever since President Obama walked into the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2009, and came to terms with his new reality. In order to prevent a full-scale economic catastrophe that failing banks and a crushed financial system threatened, the new president swallowed hard and decided to invest taxpayer money to save America’s collapsing financial system. It had to be done and nobody liked it or cheered. But the grim reality was that the alternative – a potential world-wide financial meltdown and depression – couldn’t be risked despite the bailout’s universal unpopularity.
Not that Obama and Democratic congressmen and congresswomen like Erie’s 3rd District Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper get any credit for saving the financial system and preventing that meltdown and depression.
But that could change. More and more evidence makes it clear that not only did the bailouts work, the bailouts won’t cost nearly as much as early critics warned.
Here is the good news from New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin (Imagine the Bailouts Are Working).
A taste:
Every couple of months the Treasury Department takes a moment to strategically leak some good news about the bailouts. It happened again on Monday, when a Treasury official told The Wall Street Journal that America’s coffers would be only $89 billion lighter after all accounts were settled from the rescues, down from an earlier estimate of $250 billion. It’s enough to make us all feel rich, isn’t it? Inside the Obama administration, there are whispers of even greater optimism, with some officials suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the “Death Star”; now it is a “profit center.” Of course, we’re still expected to lose $48 billion on the government’s rescue of the American International Group. But two people close to the board suggested to me that as the company recalculates the value of assets in its portfolio that were once considered “toxic,” the government could actually claw its way back to even on that investment, if it holds on to its stake long enough. A year ago, by the way, these same people told me they expected the government to take a “$100 billion bath” on its investment in A.I.G. And then there are the banks that have settled up with Uncle Sam, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. We’ve gotten all our money back from them, along with several billion dollars in interest.
