Tiger Woods Returns For 2011, And You Should Be Rooting For Him

Something funny has happened to Tiger Woods lately. Literally. He’s funny now. More honest, too. He holds impromptu Twitter interviews with fans, he laughs at himself, and he’s done hiding behind the stone cold facade of invincibility that he trademarked during his decade of dominating not just golf, but sports, in general.

Of course, that facade was cracked for him. And for all the charms of this honest, self-deprecating Tiger, he’s not really dominating anymore. At least not yet. But that’s why we should root for him.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Tiger Woods in three dimensions. That came almost 15 years ago, with Charlie Pierce’s profile in GQ. Then, we saw the “real” Tiger Woods, the same way we saw the “real” Michael Jordan during his Hall of Fame speech. It wasn’t a stone cold facade, but it wasn’t exactly warmth, either. Some excerpts:

“What I can’t figure out,” Tiger Woods asks Vincent, the limo driver, “is why so many good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball. Is it because, you know, people always say that, like, black guys have big dicks?”

And then the jokes that turned the article into something that inspired New York Times op-eds, and ensured that we wouldn’t get a close look at the real Tigers Woods ever again.

#1:

This is one of the jokes that Tiger told:

The Little Rascals are at school. The teacher wants them to use various words in sentences. The first word is love. Spanky answers, “I love dogs.” The second is respect. Alfalfa answers, “I respect how much Spanky loves dogs.” The third word is dictate. There is a pause in the room. Finally, Buckwheat puts up his hand.

“Hey, Darla,” says Buckwheat. “How my dick ta’te?”

#2:

He puts the tips of his expensive shoes together, and he rubs them up and down against each other. “What’s this?” he asks the women, who do not know the answer.

“It’s a black guy taking off his condom,” Tiger explains.

#3:

Why do two lesbians always get where they’re going faster than two gay guys?

Because the lesbians are always going sixty-nine.

We saw Tiger Woods, and depending on your disposition, it either made you blush, or bust out laughing. “He’s just like us!” the fratty guys in the room probably said. Or, from the rest of the room, “Ugh, he’s just like the rest of these overgrown children superstars...” Both reactions were true in one sense, and insane in another.

On the one hand, Tiger Woods was quite literally a member of a fraternity--the PGA Tour--and he was a superstar with the perspective of an immature child. On the other hand, he was nothing like a frat kid, making millions of dollars before his 21st birthday, and spinning the sports world on his fingertip. And he wasn’t an “overgrown” child; he was just... Well, a 21 year-old.

Everyone thought they knew Tiger then, but regardless of how we saw him, it was incomplete. Tiger’s reality was something none of us could imagine.

Now he’s 35, and everything’s changed. We all know what happened. Tiger’s life fell apart before our very eyes. The facade’s been shattered, and our first look at the “real” Tiger Woods revealed a much darker, edgier character than the 21 year-old that told a few stupid jokes. The attitudes that surprised us in GQ eventually translated to actions that still shock us, even today.

He slept with HOW MANY women?!

And he lost everything. People that never cared about him now hate him. People that always loved him now hate themselves for being duped. And none of it has a damn thing to with golf, which for Tiger, had always been his saving grace. But that’s what it took.

I wrote about Tiger’s comeback last year, and said that “we’re all insulated from various realities at one point or another. As life unfolds, we come understand it differently. The attitudes that govern our actions at 16 are very different from those which run our lives at 60. But that only happens after we experience pain, learn our limitations, confront weakness, and adjust. When something pops our little bubble and smacks us in the face. The difference with Tiger is his bubble was stronger than ours, and went unchallenged for years.”

And today, having had that bubble burst in the most spectacular way possible, he’s back, and for the first time in our lives and his, the “real” Tiger Woods resembles something real. When Tiger wrote an op-ed in Newsweek this past year, he said that “self-reliance made me think I could tackle the world by myself ... Now I know that, no matter how tough or strong we are, we all need to rely on others.”

See, the only difference between Tiger Woods and us is that his self-reliance was more successful than most of ours would have been. But life, like golf, will humble even the best of us. So here’s Tiger humbled. Realizing that some things, he can’t control. He can only try.

Again from Newsweek:

I can never truly repair the damage I’ve done, especially to my family. But I can keep trying. What endures in the record books are the achievements won through competition. What endures in our actual lives is the love of our family and the respect of others. I know now that some things can and must change with time and effort. I’m not the same man I was ... And that’s a good thing.

Maybe it’s all a product of a PR-team, but it doesn’t seem like it. He comes by shortcomings honestly now. And we may never appreciate Tiger Woods’ reality as the best golfer in the sport’s history, but the shame and pain of failure is more familiar. And if we’re lucky, so is his self-reflection and change. And instead of worshiping an airbrushed icon like Michael Jordan, golf’s Michael Jordan has been grounded by reality.

So why should you root for Tiger Woods this week and beyond? Because he’s the closest thing we’ve ever seen to perfection in his sport, and he’s the closest thing we’ve ever seen to “human” among sports’ icons. Because we’ve all been as ignorant as Tiger was in that GQ interview, and if most of us have never slept with a thousand different women the way he did later on, that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t if given the chance.

Because Tiger’s three-dimensional again, and contrition has taken the place of a child millionaire’s crass jokes. Because Tiger’s story personifies how quickly character can devolve, but that it’s never too late to evolve. Because golf’s always more fun when Tiger’s winning, but now it means something more. Because he used to be none of us, and now he’s all of us

His interviews have lost their edge these days, and as the sports talk rhetoric goes, maybe his game’s lost an edge, too. He’s an underdog now. But as the rhetoric goes, “who doesn’t love an underdog?” And if you can’t root for somebody that’s been to the top, fallen to the bottom, and is trying to build himself back up, who can you root for?