T A B L E_ T A L K

Will the quality of your child's elementary school make a difference 20 years from now? Weigh in on public vs. private education in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

A mother's guide to gunk
By Lisa Moskowitz
Help! I've got Silly Putty stuck in my eyebrows and it won't come out!
(09/30/98)

Her siren thong
By Shelley Youngblut
Eve had her apple. Monica had her thong
(09/29/98)

Uh-oh, Spaghettios
By Danny Miller
Health food junkie: A single dad's obsession
(09/28/98)

Something to declare
By Dwight Garner
Novelist Julia Alvarez has something to declare
(09/25/98)

Recipes make the woman
By Sallie Tisdale
Betty Crocker was a model woman and other kitchen myths
(09/24/98)

BROWSE THE FEW GOOD MEN ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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FALLING FOR TIGER WOODS | PAGE 1, 2
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My boyfriend at the time, a sometime actor and longtime caddy, did not take kindly to my new interest. He was solidly with Tiger throughout the Masters triumph -- "Kicked those white boys' asses up and down the fairway!" he exulted -- but quickly lost empathy when I began sighing over the latest Nike Tiger ad or gazing at a Sports Illustrated photo spread with a charged reverence he thought should be reserved for him. To admire Tiger as a bastion of racial uplift was OK; to consider him as anything beyond was blasphemous and unsettling. There was nothing my boyfriend could do but set about deconstructing a myth I had already made; of course he failed, and we eventually split. He took particular umbrage to the fact that a couple of girlfriends and I drove up to Palm Springs one weekend last fall because Tiger was playing in a tournament at La Quinta. None of us had ever been to such an event before, but we were willing to do anything (which wound up including changing a flat tire and enduring snubs by tournament officials) for a glimpse of the Man. "Tiger Woods!" my ex sputtered in the end. "He's all right. He's ... a kid. Nothing special about him."

"Beg your pardon?" I said, not bothering to conceal my sarcasm. "Nothing special?"

"Well. First of all, he looks like a whole lot of people I know. Common. Second of all, he probably won't be around that long. I know golf, and golf goes away from you. You're great one minute, a dog the next. There're a whole lot of guys been through that." He went on to detail how Tiger's ferocious swing would throw out his back, how his quick temper and penchant for winning would always undermine the patience that was much more essential to success than he yet realized. He inferred that Tiger was a lot like a million other brothers out there who, however smart and however willing, were destined to lose their way.

Not that I'm trying to establish a pattern, but I've gotten similar Tiger wariness from other black men, men for whom athletes are a no-brainer when it comes to objects of admiration. Nor do they seem to mind when the women they're close to profess an affinity for Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Ken Griffey Jr. But they are superstars to the point of seeming most real as video montages and marketing strategies, not people; Tiger is that rare superstar who seems unfinished, emotionally accessible, in part because golf grants him amazing space. He is a cowboy, a range rat. Rather than sharing turf with 10 other players or squeezing shoulder to shoulder on a bench, he is always alone with a vast green canvas. When he muffs a putt, he flinches for a gallery of thousands, and the world, to see. At one point in the tournament, flushed from the sun and having to hustle from green to green like so many foxholes, I was crouched directly behind him, right at his pants leg. He stood a couple of inches off, arms folded and lost in thought, tall and deeply brown and borderline skinny and, in the most extraordinary sense of the word, ordinary. My ex was right, but not in the way he thought; I could have swooned.

Close up, Tiger squirmed beneath his famous telegenic cool: He sighed, fidgeted a little, blew his nose, moved to take off his cap but thought the better of it, sighed again. In the dead spaces between strokes he didn't entirely know what to do with himself, and couldn't decide because he didn't know who or what was watching him, so he could only stand looking a little bewildered and overly solemn. The constraints of his altar-boy composure were nearly palpable, and my heart went out to him; despite having obscene amounts of money, Tiger had to be in one hell of a spot. I wanted more than anything to express my sympathy, but golf etiquette forced me into that same damn silence.

A year later Tiger is not as routinely setting the world afire (neither am I, but I'm trying) and the world is growing impatient, sometimes nastily so. Consider: He finishes in the top five in all of the tournaments he plays for the first three months of the year, fourth in the Masters, third in the rigorous British Open, and it is not good enough. A sports analyst on cable television grouses that "Tiger has shown me nothing." Oprah gets him back on the show so that he can publicly assess this slacking off. A recent item in the sports page of the Los Angeles Times concludes that Nike made a big mistake in sinking millions into creating a line of Tiger golf wear that is too funky for older people, too conservative for hip-hoppers -- Tiger, alas, is essentially a man without a market.

The spotlight swung back to him, briefly, in the recent PGA Championship, in which he led on the first day of play with a record-setting score of 66. But other players quickly moved ahead, then eclipsed him, and though Tiger wound up finishing in the top 10, nobody would describe it as anything but a disappointment. All this doomsday is, of course, nonsense to me. Tiger still claims all the stars in my eyes and most of the space of one wall of my office cubicle. One homemade caption taped above a pensive magazine picture of him reads, OOOOOO BABY!! and elicits raised eyebrows from people unacquainted with my obsession. A glossy autographed picture sent to me from his management firm (but he signed it himself, I'm certain) is still tacked in an exalted place above my computer at home, just above postcard shots of my other muses -- James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov. Bruce I long ago internalized, but that doesn't mean I am not seized with the feral, familiar pangs of what life might be, of what is left, when I hear the opening strains of "Thunder Road." Tiger and I have a long ways yet to travel.
SALON | Oct. 1, 1998

Erin J. Aubry is a staff writer at the L.A. Weekly.