Will Tiger Woods Weep Bitter Tears?

Elin and Tiger Woods

Sports Saturday

“When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t [true] but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.” (The Natural)

In a fine post for the New York Times that I wish I had written, Richard Wright turns to Bernard Malamud’s The Natural to figure out the meaning of the Tiger Woods sex scandal.Whatever else it may be doing to his life, however, the scandal doesn’t seem to be affecting Tiger’s golf game.In his first tournament since the scandal broke in November, Tiger Woods is only two shots off the lead going into the weekend.He is in excellent position to win his fifth Masters Tournament green jacket.

I have used Malamud’s novel to examine the case of another fallen hero, slugger Mark McGwire, but Wright has his own slant on the book.He makes the distinction between wanting to be the best and wanting to be known as the best.Tiger, he says, is like Malamud’s hero Roy Hobbs in that both are hungry for fame.Their appetites bring both of them down.

This in spite of the fact that both should know better.Here is what Wright says about Woods:

What is the lesson? Woods gave his answer to that question during his televised confession six weeks ago, while talking about his Buddhist upbringing. “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”

Yes, it’s safe to say that Woods has shown poor impulse control. But Buddhist scripture — and its ancestor, Hindu scripture — puts a finer point on the matter. When you pursue great things — great golf, great art, whatever — you shouldn’t do it because of the rewards: the acclaim, the adulation, the sex. There’s a difference between wanting to be the best and wanting to be known as the best, wanting to reap the rewards of renown. “The fruits of action,” as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, are emphatically not the point of action.

I’m not saying any mortal could passionately pursue excellence while wholly abandoning the quest for acclaim and its benefits. But I am saying that virtue involves trying.

Wright smartly differentiates between Malamud’s time period (The Natural was published in 1952) and our own by contrasting the book with the 1984 Robert Redford movie, where Hobbs emerges as a hero, not a fallen star.Malamud, Wright says, is giving us a morality play in which the hero must pay for his sins.The movie, on the other hand, indicates that redemption in our society comes easy.Wright is making a point that Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins also makes: that Tiger sees redemption more as a public relations affair than a heartfelt journey.

If that’s so, then there may be more trouble on the horizon.Some columnist—I think it was Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated—has written that the affair could make Tiger more human. He may be indulging in wish fulfillment.

That’s because the glare of fame can discourage celebrities from becoming human.I owe this insight to Jungian psychologist James Hillman and his book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling.Hillman examines the tragic life of Judy Garland and theorizes that one reason for her self-destructive behavior was a need to “grow down” and enter the regular world, She just didn’t know how to do it.  And even if she had known how, Hillman says, the pressures we put on her to be a transcendent spirit would have made it difficult for her to follow through.

The tragic result, he says, was that, instead of growing down, she fell down, with her life becoming “ambulances to the hospital, stomach pumps, blackmail, throat slashed with broken glass, stage fright, shouting matches in public, pills by the handful, a bad drunk, promiscuous sex, sequestered salary, turned out in the street, bleak despair, and paralyzing terror.”Hillman explains, “It is as if the world that she never reached kept pulling her into it by means of its usual instruments: sex and money, dealers and lovers, brokers and contracts, marriages and failures.”

Perhaps Tiger engaged in self-destructive behavior because he wanted to get caught.Being exposed, after all, would feel more real than his bubble.Imagine thinking that you have to be a perfect model all the time—you are the most famous athlete in a world that worships its athletes and you are held to inhuman standards.If Tiger thought he had to play the perfect son and husband and father, maybe seedy sexual escapades where he knew he was being naughty came as a relief.

Malamud doesn’t provide this particular explanation for Roy Hobbs’ behavior, but the author is aware of how the spotlight can destroy our stars.If Tiger thinks that his salvation just lies in a public relations campaign, therefore, he will have to think again.The underlying problems haven’t gone away.

Wright, somewhat cynically, doesn’t think that the ending of Malamud’s novel awaits Tiger.After all, today we give our athletes second (and third and fourth) chances. Besides, we are less judgmental.We’re not going to run a man out of sports for cheating on his wife. Especially if the game of golf depends on him.

But rather than saving Tiger, a second chance could work to his detriment.If he wins and the adulation (even if modified) begins again, then he may think that he doesn’t have to weep Roy Hobbs’ bitter tears. That’s unfortunate because bitter tears could be the first step on his road to salvation.It may be either that or more self-destructive behavior.