STORY ARC

Deconstructing Tiger: Vanity Fair Delivers Satisfying Ending To Woods' Downfall

By Elizabeth C.

BUZZ BISSINGER SIFTS THROUGH THE DETRITUS OF TIGER WOODS' career in an upcoming Vanity Fair issue that photographically depicts the golfer looking more like thief than legend.

VF's February cover shows Tiger bare-chested, wearing somber expression and dark stocking cap. The profile delivers more or less the same: A publicly undressed Tiger, no longer caped superhero, but an imperfect man who calculatingly obscured his darker impulses.

Bissinger stitches together by now the well-worn "alleged" anecdotes about Tiger's accidental unmasking -- the wrathful wife slicing him with a golf club; the fire hydrant; the Ambien-fueled sex capades; the spankings and hair pulling; the payoffs. He then wraps it all up into a tidy conclusion to satisfy the public:

"In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are."

Well, at the very least we hope so, the idea of getting so snookered an insult to our collective intelligence.

Bissinger writes that: "Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back. When he was taken to the hospital for injuries, a fake name was used."

In a strange twist, I happened to meet Tiger Woods in 1997 when I worked as a producer on a talk show. (I happened to have met the kind Mr. Bissinger too, but that's for another story.) Tiger's visit to the show came days after his first win of the Master’s Tournament. His appearance elevated the excitement backstage to levels I had not seen before or after my tenure. And it also drew a front-row audience of husbands and significant others from top brass.

And another memory lingers: a then 21-year-old Tiger used a crude sexual pun as his hotel pseudonym. It did not shock so much as surprise. And, as Bissinger shows in detail, that fake name was a mere flash of the sex-obsessed persona captured by a GQ writer that year. In that interview, Tiger unguardedly made numerous black dick jokes.

The Tiger saga is not yet played out. Divorce papers have to be filed; the public act of contrition is still being planned. Privately, Tiger is probably only just beginning to recognize his ultimate disservice by the man who loved him best, Earl Woods.

But even for fans of the golfer, there's a sense that justice’s been served to Tiger the "image."

“He deluded himself into thinking he could be something that he wasn’t: untouchable,’’ Buzz writes. “The greatest feat of his career is that he managed to get away with it for so long in public, the bionic man instead of the human one who hit a fire hydrant.”

Comments

The English boys need to keep Tiger at Bay and it's all theirs

Posted by: Shonta Ahler | April 10, 2010 02:25 PM