SALON

Monday, Apr 9, 2012 3:43 PM UTC

Tiger joins the Lost Boys

After another disappointing tournament, Woods' career is looking more and more like Mike Tyson's and O.J. Simpson's

By

Topics: Sports,

Tiger joins the Lost BoysTiger Woods (Credit: AP/Kin Cheung)

Of the three Lost Boys of SportsWorld – Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson – I’ve always found Tiger the least appealing or interesting, yet the most poignant. He grew up before our eyes. At 2, he swung his cut-down club for Bob Hope on TV as his Zeus-ish Dad, Earl, beamed over him. By 5, Tiger was giving tips in Golf Digest. The real question he needed to answer, I came to think, was whether he truly loved golf or just wanted Earl to love him.

After all, how could you repay a dad who said, “There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One.”

The Guiding One died in 2006, three years before the Chosen One cracked up and stopped winning major tournaments, four short of Jack Niklaus’ record of 18. Tiger’s mind was blown. I didn’t much care. This wasn’t Magic Johnson getting sick or Dale Earnhardt hitting the wall. This was a surly, entitled control freak who had intimidated the golfing media and gotten a pass in general because he made the 1-percenters even richer.

But he was a Lost Boy, after all, and that old poignancy must have bubbled up because I found myself rooting for him – as I always have for O.J. and Iron Mike – through the Masters tournament this weekend. And what could better serve the narrative than the Chosen One coming back to us on Easter Sunday? I should have known better. With Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow, who may possibly be angels, already in play, why would the Great Scorekeeper waste a round on a churl who had blown it. Back in 2002, Tiger could have integrated the Augusta National Golf Course with females and all shades of golfers of color, with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

But now he just kept slipping deeper in the Masters pack. He sulked and raged, cursed and threw clubs. Maybe he was sensing, as I was, that he was beginning the long slide down into the sports department of Limbo where Mike and O.J. await.

Of the three Lost Boys, I met Mike Tyson first, when he was around 14. He was a retired mugger from Brooklyn remanded to the Tryon School for Boys in upstate New York. He was beating up all the inmates and starting on the guards when a counselor brought him to Cus D’Amato, a once-famous fight manager down on his luck who lived nearby. The aging white man saw the chunky black kid as a, well, Chosen One.

He eventually adopted Mike and added his own rage and paranoia to Mike’s. He taught Mike to use his fears as fuel. Mike was still in his teens when Cus told me, “He may go down as one of the greatest fighters of all time … if there are no distractions.”  Cus died in 1985, the year before Mike, at 20, became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. He soon became distracted and began to spin out of control.

I met O.J. for the first time in 1969 at Joe Namath’s bar in Manhattan where he told me a story. At a teammate’s wedding, he said, he was sitting at a table with other black players when a white woman said, “You don’t have to sit with the niggers, you can sit with us.” When I expressed my liberal horror, he grinned at my ignorance. She was telling him, he insisted, that she didn’t see him as black or white, just as O.J. Lost Boy, indeed.

I came to Tiger, indirectly, when he was about 15 – and missed the story. An old black man came up to me on a public golf course in L.A., tapped my notebook and told me he had a better story than whatever I was covering. There was a kid, he said, who would soon own golf because of his father, a former Green Beret lieutenant colonel. Dad had taken Tiger to a military course where an admiral spotted him and said, “You’ve got some golfer there, Sergeant.” Earl would have Tiger make the payback for that racial and class slur.

When Tiger crashed his car in 2009 and the turgid details of his psycho sex life emerged,  I had the same thought I had in 1997 when Mike, after three years in jail for rape, bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear while losing a title fight: This is how you declare emotional bankruptcy when you’ve been conditioned to never quit, when blowing up your world is the only way out.

Maybe O.J.’s blundering  kidnapping and armed robbery caper in 2007 was also a psychic suicide. It seemed too silly to be judged seriously, so I figured he was sentenced for being acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in 1995. I had been ridiculed for my theory then that O.J. was protecting the real killer, his son, knowing he could beat the rap while the kid couldn’t. I’m delighted that the theory has reappeared in a new book. O.J. is 64 and in prison until at least 2017.

Iron Mike, 45, seemingly smiley on meds, can be seen in such odd fare as the “Hangover” movies, a cable reality show in which he trains racing pigeons, and the Charlie Sheen roast (I do recommend James Toback’s superb documentary “Tyson”).

None of the Lost Boys was able to craft his own character, to be his own man. Cus created his son to whip the world but not to find and hold his place in it. O.J. had too many fathers – coaches, producers, directors – and he spent his life trying to please them. By the closing rounds of the Masters, it began to seem possible that Tiger was ready to hole out and join them.

Robert Lipsyte is a former New York Times sports columnist. His new memoir, "An Accidental Sportswriter," has just been published. More Robert Lipsyte.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 98 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations