Tiger Woods: the Public's Unreal Expectations and Ungrateful Tactless Peers

Who do Craig Parry, Jesper Parnevik, and all the arm-chair hanging judges think they are? Let the ones without sin cast the first stones, we are all humans who are not infallible. The Babe, Air Jordan, and Kobe were/are no saints either!

The fact of the matter is that the public willingly places Tiger and other "non-public figures" on pedestals because of the immense admiration for their stunning professional achievements, not for their personal virtues.

They did not ask or necessarily want to be role models, as our elected political leaders should, but too often do not, nor did they offer certain guaranteed virtues the public wish for! What public whippings were administered to Presidents FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, and Clinton for their decades-long infidelity?

This is a private Woods-family problem. If the public want to ostracize Tiger, it's simple: do not watch him play golf anymore. But then the PGA Tour's prize money would free fall, and out of shape “Joe-Average Has-Beens” (e.g., Parry: two non-major PGA wins from 1992 to 2006) would not be able to afford to live the same high-life just down the road from Woods.

This is actually an opportune time for Tiger to find out who his real friends are! And as for those greedy and often-corrupt corporate sponsors (e.g., Accenture used to be part of the now disgraced and defunct Arthur Andersen, and was incorporated in Bermuda to be “tax-efficient?”), good riddance!

Going forward, the real issue here is not whether Tiger committed a moral transgression (by the way, we do not even have all the relevant facts; I would not be surprised if another 20 or more women come out soon with “claims”—fueled by the Paparazzi, which now include ABC and ESPN, both owned by Disney ), but how he owns up and makes amends to those people that really matter to him, and whether their hearts have sufficient capacity to forgive in light of the big picture.

Sadly for him, once trust is lost, it takes immense time and effort to repair, if possible at all.

From watching two-decades of televised interviews, my impression is that Tiger is a hard-working, no-excuse, not-aloof, clutch competitor and winner. Furthermore, I would guess that many of those virtues came from his father—a mostly black man who was able to achieve the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the elite Green Beret in war during the racist 1960s.

Has anybody mentioned that his father was dying from prostate cancer, and indeed passed on, around the time Tiger supposedly morphed into a “sex addict”? From my humble personal vantage point, infidelity by both human sexes often occurs not because of the sex act alone.

Only a person who has suffered the loss of an invaluable-close loved one just as he was being pushed onto a world-stage, while at a young age under immense pressure, could remotely start to understand, let alone chastise. Who were and continue to be there for Tiger?