Saturday Night Live had a skit this week in which the actors played three real-life adulterous politicians, all of whom are somewhat upset that America isn’t paying much attention to them any more. “I had a love child! A LOVE CHILD!” shouted the actor playing John Edwards. “I went to Argentina and came up with some lame excuse that I was hiking the Appalachian Trail!” said the actor portraying Mark Sanford.
They ‘resented’ being pushed aside because Tiger Woods had come along and taken all of the oxygen out of the room. But the joke also represents an important fact: The Tiger situation is different. Sure, there’s the usual tawdry tabloid stuff — the scourned wife, the scene outside of the house, a multitude of questions surrounding that whole situation — but there’s more than that.
It’s worth contemplating just how deep the previously inscrutable Woods has dived into the sleaze pool. There are numerous reports that he’s reached double digits on the mistress list — a special number that really makes the word “mistress” meaningless.
When you’ve touched that level and scale of serial cheat-dom, you can’t really claim you were ever married. You never took any of that stuff seriously. You didn’t fall off the wagon, or give in to what you heart was telling you. You just did what you did, again and again and again, and what you were doing was pretty twisted and obsessive by any reasonable measure of healthy behavior.
And that’s what’s different here. Woods had carefully built an image of seriousness, dedication and athletic professionalism that seemingly had driven him to the top position in his sport — and arguably, the top position in all of professional sports. He had the trophy wife and the trophy family. He controlled that image with the same will that showed in his golf game. And meanwhile, he appears to have been the sleaziest sort of moneyed-VIP-room-at-the-strip-club player.
It’s not just a moral judgment to say that this behavior is wrong. It’s wrong because when the whole thing fell down — and this lifestyle always falls down — the detritus was terrible. There is a huge wave of shattered lives in Woods’ wake now — a wave bigger than any cheater I can think of except for Bill Clinton — and he alone is responsible for that.
This is a forgiving nation, and it’s not like Woods had his finger on the nuclear trigger, and we’ll probably all move along to the next sideshow soon enough. But it wouldn’t be so horrible to express a little lasting contempt for this whole episode, and to keep that in mind for the future when we talk about Woods’ “greatness.”
