In light of how insufferable ESPN is going to be this week regarding Tiger’s bulging disc I thought “hey, I’ll add to the insufferable-ness and write a Tiger column!” Great, everyone can be miserable together!

Still love him

Ironically, the person I’ve gleaned the most wisdom from regarding Tiger-gate is someone who doesn’t even like sports. Maybe that’s a metaphor on some grand scale or maybe it’s just a coincidence, I have no idea.

It was the first week of April. Jenn and I were getting frozen yogurt and talking about our forthcoming trip to Augusta (her first) for The Masters. I asked her if she was rooting for Tiger, half expecting some 30-minute rant about women’s rights and a full exegesis of Ephesians 5:25. Instead I got, “yeah, sure, I’d love it if he won.” Excuse me while I scrape the pomegranate-flavored yogurt I just threw up off the table. “You want him to win?! What about your boy Adam Scott?” “Well I want to Tiger to win if he doesn’t.”

I asked her to explain and we had a nice little discussion about sports, culture, morality, and what God thinks about it all.

The point was (and is) this: if you hate Tiger now, if you want him to miss every cut and to never reach his living legend status ever again then that tells me more about you than it does about him.

If all of those things are true then that implies that you looked up to him as a person, that you believed in his morality, that you were invested in who he was from an ethical (if not spiritual) standpoint.

My question is…why?

Why would you put so much stock in the wisdom and integrity of a human being who you have never met and will never meet?

It seems to me that we want to extrapolate people’s qualities. Tim Tebow is great at football therefore he must be intelligent! Tom Brady is terribly good-looking therefore he must be a great dad! Kevin Durant works really hard therefore he must treat girls with respect!

What fallible reasoning indeed.

I still like Tiger because I never bought into him as a person. I just love watching him play golf. If you hate his golf game (and I have a few friends who do) then fine but don’t purchase what Nike and Tag Heuer are selling: that the art of being a human being is a derivative of the art of being an athletic wonder.

You’ll never win.