A Tolerable Redemption for Tiger Woods
Last month, President Tiger Woods awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The ceremony took place at White House Rose Garden, a few weeks after Woods had desperately prayed to win at the Masters golf tournament.
It was a serene afternoon, but people have hurried anyway – about the age of Woods (43 is not old enough), about his currency (hello, he is still playing), about the ethics of it all ( he is in business with the president), about his sense of morality (tiger, why this White House resident?). He and the president were wearing similar blue suits. So even optically, the optics didn't look great.
The highlight of the afternoon – the part that you think about when you think about a moment like this, the part that will run in the newspapers and about the sports locations, the part that there in the name of the ceremony is – was the medal part.
When it was time for the President to put it on his receiver, Woods looked funny, unusual diminutive, as if he were receiving a bib. When the president was ready, you could see that something else was out: the ribbon was twisted right in front of you, on his left, like all the belts I see, spiraling around dresses and raincoats. It was not the end of the world. But you see something like that, a flub, a blemish, during what, even for the very famous, hugely accomplished people who tend to receive this honor, is one of the larger, more photographed experiences of life, and you think, why not someone fix it?
His family was there. Such was the first lady. But perhaps nobody solved it because everyone was too excited to notice or to care. Maybe nobody solved it, because these little things are the irony of Tiger Woods now. And a man who is known for using the power of clothing (especially those red polo shirts on tournament Sundays) to intimidate opponents and predict the victory, has recently been helpless against the plans that clothing accessories – have in store for him. I know, I know: they are just clothes. But it is also this peeks into a state of mind. Sometimes, like with that ribbon, what you wear can be even more cosmic than that.
He came back. Could you not do it?
Tiger Woods was just as famous for being on the bottom as being at the top, and almost as long.
He has spent a decade as a divorced skirt hunter with a pill problem and a sex addiction and a rebellious back? The embodiment of disciple was now the scandal image. His sponsors have dumped him. The jaws of fans disappeared. And everything seemed fair. And there have been times when it felt as though Woods was basking in justice, in entertainment. Moments like the missing tooth.
Four years ago, Woods traveled to the Italian Alps to see his then girlfriend, Lindsey Vonn, clean up during the World Skiing Championship. He had recently shot what was his worst round of golf at the time, at the Waste Management Phoenix Open (the greatest toxicity and golf have been given to Don DeLillo since "Players"), and it seemed like things couldn't come Worse for him at it celebrities, sports and psychological accidents.
But then he went to Italy and left the house with a knitted hat and a half-face mask printed with a skull. No snowman. Not eleven. No Space Invader. A skull. He was fully aware that his front tooth was gone (something of a cameraman who accidentally touches him and turns him off). It was an image that was funny, sad, perhaps self-numbing or, if you were generous, trolling. Our greatest living golfer had become the secondary villain in a "Fast and Furious" movie.
It is possible that the professional comeback of Woods also satisfies the curiosity of some of us to know what an acceptable deliverance looks like at the moment.
Woods' violations are not standard # MeToo material. Because of his own recognition at a gloomy, style-free press conference in 2010, he was a bad husband, but also a poor role model. "Everyone has good reasons to be critical of me," he said while reading a script. You could hear shame and discomfort in his voice. You could also just look at the infallibly spacious blue shirt he was wearing that day. It didn't want to be there either.
So this year's Renaissance – he's playing again in the United States Open in Pebble Beach, California – seemed all the more palatable for how morally and medically difficult it was likely. To the extent that the average person was ever able to identify with Woods, it was probably in the extraordinary average seriousness of his sins and the biblical boundary work that we could see him doing his way back.
Who knows? He came back. Will not you?
Staying smooth and politically silent
It is also possible that, socially speaking, a new relevant Tiger Woods promises what the previously infallible version did: this dream of integration for a sport destined to, in the United States, to remain largely white; this proof, for people like my grandmother, of black excellence. Woods was of course a stubborn racial hero before his fall. His appearance with the president last month confirms how rude he remains in being born again
In the Trump era, the visit of the sports champion White House racially broken a number of teams. The white players of Boston Red Sox accepted an invitation that most non-white players rejected. In his prime, Woods rarely succumbed to pressure, not as a golfer, not as the son of a Thai mother and an African-American father, not as the punch line in a classic "Chappelle & # 39; s Show" sketch in which Asians and black people argued about who would get him in the first round of a racial tour.
When Woods was down and things looked very low, I noticed that I was wondering where, culturally speaking, he would turn. Would he put together something introspective for The Players & Tribune about the loneliness of being a black man in the PGA Tour? Would he be going to be cute, instead to mines for help, love and "likes"? How many "Ellen" visits would he make? Who would tell him how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?
But he did not become fuzzy or needy. He seemed to enjoy this macabre bizarre self . For example, his idea of making a splash with the kiddies was a tweet, from 2016, of himself without a shirt, in black sunglasses, with a pale blonde goatee, a white wig under a black baseball cap and a face of mild threat. He called this look "Mack Daddy Santa." (It was more mock-gangsta than that. It was "Tyga Woods.") We haven't heard from the Children & # 39; s Television Workshop, but he did say his kids love it. After all, Woods had raced himself – as a joke. But it was a sign of life, another signal that if Woods could no longer be a great golfer, he would make a great heel.
Woods has talked about only wanting to identify himself as if, as if the desire of some, because he was Muhammad Ali, he only strengthened the perception that he was apolitical and racially agnostic, such as PB. away from racial independence by Donald Trump. The implosive iconoclasm of Kanye West was accompanied by visits to the Trump Tower and the White House. And just like Woods, he also got matchy-matchy, making his hair as yellow as the president's.
Wood's alignment has no Western madness, commotion, or historical blasphemy. He does not have to declare, explain or deny. As the owner of a presidential medal of freedom (and another green coat), he can maintain a flexible political silence. Maybe he has achieved forgiveness. But that missing tooth, that Santa tweet, that twisted ribbon – they all say, "Don't forget."
