We don’t know Tiger, or even ourselves

By TOMMY TOMLINSON

I’m not interested in whether Tiger Woods owes us an explanation beyond what he said Wednesday morning: “I have let my family down and I regret my transgressions with all of my heart.”

I’m more interested in the explanations we owe him.

Or, maybe, ourselves.

Can we explain why we buy stuff just because Tiger says so? He endorses Tag Heuer watches, AT&T telephones, Gatorade drinks, Gillette razors and Nike everything. Tiger delivers an audience of grown men (and some women) who buy from those companies because he tells them to. He makes much more from this than he does from winning tournaments. Tiger’s real job is no longer golf; his real job is advertising.

I can understand why somebody might buy a putter if the world’s greatest golfer says it’s good. But a watch? Or a certain type of razor blade? Does that make any sense at all?

Can we explain why we still expect gifts to come with grace? If watching celebrities has taught us anything, it’s that talent is doled out with the fairness of a roulette wheel. The finest singers, the boldest painters, the most brilliant politicians — as people, they’re no better than the rest of us, except they’re faced with more temptations. Yet we keep trying to link great skill with great morality, even though when they match up it’s just dumb luck.

It’s fine to admire Tiger for his ability to stripe a drive down the fairway of the 18th hole at the Masters. But that’s what he does. It’s not who he is. To believe otherwise is to be like a child who believes Batman is real.

‘Glee’

Can we explain why we enjoy it so much when celebrities get in trouble? I’ve spent the morning reading the stories and comments and tweets on the Web, and the only word that comes to mind is “glee.” It’s not just the people kicking dirt on Tiger. It’s his defenders, too — one of the trending topics on Twitter was whymencheat. The glee is in the conversation — the naughtiness of joking about adultery and domestic violence, the delicious thrill of shoplifting the privacy of one of the world’s most private men.

(For the record, I plead guilty. Just like many of you, I went looking for photos of the alleged other women, mainly to see if they’re as beautiful as Tiger’s wife. They’re not.)

Can we explain why we think we know people we’ve never met?

We don’t know how much it hurt him to betray his wife like that, how much he regrets it, how sincerely he promised her — and himself — to never do it again. We don’t know if this will break their marriage, or if it will just leave a crack that never quite seals.

The reason we don’t know those things is that we don’t know Tiger Woods. All we know is the little bits we see on the golf course, and the professionally crafted images on commercials, and now this sad little moment in his driveway at 2 in the morning.

Those pieces don’t add up to a real human being.

And maybe the last thing we need to explain to ourselves is why we think they do.

X Tommy Tomlinson is a columnist for the Charlotte Observer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.