While publicly gasping at the impossible invulnerability of Tiger Woods time and again in the not too distant past, most of us were privately hoping that the armour would fall off and the champion would become more accessible — not in the physical sense but in a psychological sort of way. After all, vulnerable, mortal men, warts and all, are so much more easily digested cognitively than the can-do-no-wrong superheroes of sporting myths.
You almost wanted to say, Come on Tiger, get real! You were dying to see who he really was, to glimpse the complete package. Then, all of a sudden, he let us in, albeit accidentally.
First, Tiger failed as a husband and a father. Then, more significantly, he failed as a champion golfer in 2010. In the last Major event of the season, the PGA championship, the great man was nowhere near the top following a mediocre — by his standards — performance. There are precious few ways in which to succeed at the very top in sport; there are many, many more ways in which to fail.
Tiger chose to fail gloriously — that is, he offered us the chance to glorify in his fall, the chance to be stomping on his drooping shoulders and hollering: ‘I told you so. He is no superman. He's messed up, he's all done.'
Special allure
Part of sport's special allure has to do with its endlessly generous capacity to turn a great hero into a villain, an awe-inspiring winner into a depressingly inept loser. This spectacle is far more riveting than its polar opposite, John Nobody spectacularly becoming a Mr. Somebody overnight. Somehow, the riches to rags story appears to have a moral resonance greater than the clichéd rags to riches stuff.
Sport is full of people with moral flakiness — quite a few sportsmen, and people in the sports business generally, have the morals of an alley cat. But in this era of information overload and spectacularly over-the-top media coverage, when television channels and tabloid newspapers seek to turn banal, quotidian stuff into elaborate moral narratives to offer readers a vicarious emotional experience, Tiger's vertiginous fall was Media Event 2010.
“There is no success quite like failure,'' said Bob Dylan. In the entire first decade of the new millennium, the sports media has enjoyed no ‘success' quite as much as it did in Tiger's fall from grace.
Decorated career
He putted and missed. He flailed and winced. He drove and unerringly found the bunkers. It was almost as if the sweet spot in Tiger's clubs went missing, the very spot that met the ball almost magically time after time in a bejewelled career celebrated even by the harshest of critics.
Ear plugs, please, Mozart is playing. Eyeshades, please, Picasso is on show.
Does an athlete, however great, have an obligation to always be the person he is supposed/perceived to be, as a morally upright human being, as a champion? Once he raises the bar, does he have to go on performing at his customary altitude? What sort of pressure does this kind of expectation put on him?
Hasn't Picasso ever painted a stinker after a nasty confrontation with one of his many partners? Hasn't Hemingway ever written the odd meretricious trash after having one daiquiri too many?
Whether in art or sport or pottery or something as simple as cooking an average night's dinner, when your mind is freighted with anxiety, things can go horribly wrong.
Do we have a right to believe/say that we would never accept anything less than the truly extraordinary/the most sublime from Tiger? Don't watch him if you are pained to see him struggle but Tiger does have the right to slog as much as the next person, even if a good majority of his 14 titles did not feature much slogging — for they were acquired through composition of golf rather than through mundane competition.
Unforgiving sport
In a team sport, a great player in decline can fade away like an old soldier, almost unnoticed. But this is not possible in a brutal, unforgiving individual sport such as golf. Every little crack is magnified. A mirror is held to every bleeding wound. Every wrinkle is noticed and debated. No plastic surgery is possible. There is no botox that can fix athletic skills-erosion.
Time, of course, does. And, believe me, Tiger's decline is unlikely to be terminal. What may appear as a hangman's noose to us, great players look at as an escape loop. And Tiger's game is not so much a game or a battle-plan as it is a master conductor's cleverly crafted opera.
As Tiger departed from Sheboygan, finishing 28th in the PGA championship on Sunday, quite a few scribes were ready to write a part of the script that sports critics and fans alike always seemed to have enjoyed doing while seldom getting the timing right when it comes to truly great players — the last chapter of the Tiger Saga.
Then again, Tiger has got used to reading his own obits this year. He will live to read about Tiger roaring back in the seasons to come.
It's just that it would be Tiger Mark II. Mark I was unreal and fantastical. The second one will be mortal, vincible, fallible but rather more acceptable and human in many ways. But Tiger Mark II will still be a champion. If there are doubters, count this column out from that lot.
