Tiger Woods: My Hero!

I never much liked golf. So I never really became much of a Tiger Woods fan.

Until now.

Seems like the entire media circus is drumming on about Tiger's marital infidelities, how big a scandal this is, and how this will cause his sponsors to drop him. Over and over it's played how big a negative impact this is upon his image, and his career.

Fucking why?!

Okay, so we all used to think he was a pretty clean-cut golfer, who was tops at his game (which he still is) and was ground-breaking as one of the only minorities to make it in a predominantly white sport. Turns out, with his father out of the way, he's become something of a playboy, flirting around and sometimes even sleeping around with supermodels.

I hate to always be the one to point out the obvious, but, GOOD! He's banging cover girls on the side! Bully for him! So would I if I had his money and his fame. (Notice I didn't say his good looks, since I think I have the edge there, especially for women who go for bald guys.)

And so what if he is, anyway? Do we naively think that Jack Nicklaus never had an affair? Do we really imagine that pro golfers don't screw around just as much as any other celebrity? I should hope that we're not that myopic, especially in this day and age. Arguably, since golfers hobknob around the country club circuit as professionals in a field where doctors and lawyers play the game for recreation, you would think that they would make it a regular habit of sleeping with the ugly rich men's trophy wives. Why the hell not?

This isn't the end of his career. Tiger's just a golfer, people. He's not a Republican politician.

Frankly, instead of hiding from it, or making statements to the press about how embarrassed and ashamed he is, and calling for privacy, I think Tiger should do exactly the opposite. He should set up an interview for Playboy magazine, and confess all. "Hell yeah, I slept with several supermodels!" he should tell them. "Aren't you jealous?" He should tell the magazine, how many, how often, and brag about it. His wife's as good as gone anyway, what's he got to lose? After that, he should be given the key to the Playboy Mansion, and told to have himself a good time. And in embracing his new playboy image, he'll find his career is as solid as ever, and his sponsors will want even more of him. Those sponsors that don't want him, well, they'll be replaced with other sponsors, won't they? Tiger's just too good a commodity to lose, unless some CEO is a damned fool.

So why is everyone so convinced this is a negative, especially Tiger? Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that he's seen by most people to be a ground-breaking figure for civil rights. He does for golf what Jackie Robinson did for baseball and Barack Obama did for politics. Right?

Well, almost. It's never been forgotten how Tiger appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and openly stated that he didn't really think of himself as black. (Gasps from the crowd.) He explained that his father was black, and that he was one quarter white and one quarter Phillippino. As such, the African-American community has never really seen him as an ideal hero. But he had such a clean-cut image that they put up with this blatant declaration of common sense to see him as one of their own anyway. Now that he's no longer clean-cut, it seems that the perception is that the African-American market might just turn its back on him.

You know what? If they do, fuck them! That's right, you heard me. How many complete shitheads and scumbags have African-Americans stood by over the years? From O.J. Simpson, to Kobe Bryant, to Barry Bonds, to Michael Vick, to Darrell Strawberry... the list goes on and on. Cheats, thugs, hoodlums, criminals, in some cases outright murderers... each one given a pass just because they could play a sport. How hypocritical to turn their back on Tiger Woods for the relatively mild quirk of merely boinking beltway broads? Remember Magic Johnson, and how he contracted AIDS because he was screwing fifteen cheap hookers a night? Magic wasn't abandoned. Tiger shouldn't be, either.

So he doesn't see himself as black. And, Oprah, neither should you! Michael Vick, you're not black either! Neither are you, Ray Lewis! The whole black/white thing was a LIE, cooked up by evil bastards who wanted an excuse to exploit their fellow human beings for slave labor. How DARE you fuckheads keep that ridiculous falsehood alive! That goes for you clowns in the media, too! The scientific fact is that we are all ONE HUMAN RACE! Period! We aren't different colors. We're different shades of the SAME color! It's high time our use of language stopped pretending that we're separate. It's high time that we recognized ourselves as the like-kindred we are.

If we look up to Thomas Jefferson as a hero, even though he fucked black slaves, then we should also look to Tiger Woods as a hero, even though he fucked white women who are not only not slaves, but could have any man they want. They wanted Tiger. Get over it.

So yeah, he's my new hero. I think he is to a lot of other people, too. The question now is, will he ever come to realize it?

Eric