On November 27th when I opened up my MSN account I found a bold headline screaming "Tiger Woods Injured in a Car Crash." When I first saw it, I panicked because I expected the worst. Here's this young beacon of hope for a lot of people who's worked himself to the bone to get where he is in his professional career and now he's been hurt. Though I saw the headlines from two days before on some magazine claiming that he had a mistress, when I looked at the woman I simply thought that Woods had unfortunate taste and that worse things have happened than a professional athlete loving on some woman with too much spray tan. I didn't make the connection that the story about his crash would lead to revelations about his extra-marital affairs. Or that there'd be claims that his Swedish wife (and yes, apparently it's important for us to remember that she's Swedish since no article ever lets us forget it) Elin came after him with one of his golf clubs.
The thing that gets me about a story like this is the way people have reacted to it. The guy is 34 damn years old, worth millions and millions dollars, known worldwide and is incredibly successful. Is this really a surprise to Elin? We know she's blond and that's always a plus, right? And she's young and she's willing to have his children, right? And she wanted to stay married him forever and ever, right? Unfortunately for Elin, so do hundreds of other women! I do feel sorry for what has happened to her and I don't wanna claim absolutely that she couldn't have been shocked about this, but it seems that the REAL reason she has been so upset is that we all found out about it. He's revealed a crack in the picture perfect image of them as a young couple and now she's been humiliated. There are all kinds of sexual taboos that Americans pretend to be astonished by (for example, cheating) but we engage in them all the time. It's always Bad News Bears for the people who are reckless enough to get caught, though.
In our society, a person's sex life is often somehow related to his work life. What in the Sam Hell does his adultery have to do with his ability to swing a club or sell watches in an ad campaign? People keep claiming "he's let so many people down" and he himself said he was sorry about his "indiscretions." Why should Tiger Woods have to apologize to anyone but his wife? The danger in living in a celebrity-obsessed culture is that we tend conflate a person's talent and their private actions as if they're of equal importance. It's like we're looking to celebrities for some model not just of skill but also of moral conduct. I never would've thought about Tiger's sexcapades for a nano-second before but now I keep seeing headlines about his latest lady friend. It doesn't matter to me who Tiger sleeps with and it really shouldn't concern anyone but Elin Nordegren. Like my roommate always says, "Is he paying my bills? No? Then I don't care what he does." She's right.
Actually, I'll take it back. I do care about Tiger Woods' personal life and conduct outside of the golf course but here are the reasons why: 1) I've never liked that he's often tried to downplay his blackness (but those are his own issues to work through or not) 2) I wish he wouldn't have picked cocktail waitresses who looked like rejects from the third season of Rock of Love and 3) I wish he could've kept this all underwraps because if he had, he wouldn't have to keep blowing up my newsfeed saying he's sorry about some stuff that none of us should worry about. So for all of this mess and for American's paradoxical prudish and sex-obsessed nature I have to ask: what's up with that?
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