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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SPORTSCASTERS MAY HAVE ABANDONED

THIS YOUNG WONDER, BUT I'M STILL BY HIS SIDE.

BY ERIN J. AUBRY | It's been well over a year now since I became a devotee of Tiger Woods. It was instantaneous, highly combustible love, the kind that in a span of a weekend cheerfully made mincemeat of the fact that I'd never watched a golf tournament, set foot on a proper course or swung a club more than twice in succession. I fell for Tiger the same way the tomboyish protagonist of one of my favorite adolescent books, "Tunes for a Small Harmonica," fell in love with her wispy English teacher, a man she despised until one morning, listening to him read aloud one of his favorite obscure poems, she sat up in her chair and fell in love in the tiny rhythmic pause between one stanza and the next, in the drawing of a breath.

Tiger happened to me like that. I was sitting on a sofa on a Sunday, the last day of the Masters last spring, dragged there by a friend who insisted that black history was being made and I needed to witness it. Somewhere between the 10th and final holes the heavens opened up over my head and the poetry of Tiger fell rapturously into place. I divined the meaning not merely of his pending iconhood, but the things nobody knew or cared to think about: the razored hairs running down the back of his neck, the constraints yet wild possibility of his youth, the touching sureness of his stride as he headed into the terrible unknown. Here were outsized puppy feet at heartbreaking odds with a lovely, perfectly formed face and the guileless eyes of either a saint or a complete madman -- God damn if I wasn't going to be the one to find out which thing he was. In a few hours Tiger reconnected me with a heedless kind of faith and a sense of journey I hadn't felt in years; he made a Siddhartha out of me at a time in my life when, despite having potency of almost palpable weight, it couldn't have had less direction.

It's all the more remarkable because the last thing I ever thought would inspire me is golf. The closest I ever got to the sport was during childhood, growing up on a south Los Angeles street that dead-ended into a public course. On hot summer afternoons a group of friends and I would convene at the course fence, collect the balls that had accidentally been hit into our street and shamelessly sell them back to passing golfers for a quarter, after which we'd head to the neighborhood liquor store to spend our loot on ice cream and such. My best friend of the last 15 years, the one who lured me to his living room last spring for the Masters, is an aficionado who regularly held forth on the subtler glories of golf, but to little avail. I hated golf in the elliptical way I hated asparagus, not because I didn't like the taste, but because the whole thing was so colossally unappealing I could never bring myself to taste it. In short, I didn't see the point of embracing golf -- until Tiger Woods, and the Masters.

Tiger made a fool out of me like I hadn't been made since 1984 and Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." tour, when I thrilled to a whole canon of images I had never seen or lived but felt nonetheless -- a Jersey boardwalk, a dark road to nowhere, the small-town entropy of dreams. Words failed my enormity of feeling; at Bruce's concert I could only throw up my arms, sway, waggle fingers in delirious assent. Tiger, in a very different but no less significant way, brought me to my feet and made me do the same thing in front of a television. If Bruce illuminated for me the redemptive power of despair -- of a life poorly lived, of the chance at another -- Tiger illuminated a similar power of confidence, of possibly getting your shit right the first go-round. Last April, at the age of 35, overburdened with caution and a sense that my dubious star had risen and was rising no further, that was a revolutionary thought indeed. Golf was suddenly the most salient of metaphors. Tiger was not only convincing me of my own native ability to tackle the unknowable, he was making history, and in the process agitating a tsunamic wave of sociocultural introspection beneath his golf-spiked puppy feet, introspection of a scale that hadn't been forced upon this politically somnolent country since Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Which is not to say that we agreed on everything. Tiger and I had our political differences, which were sharpest at the points where he asserted he saw no skin color, that he felt affronted at being called only black. "Oh, bullshit, Tiger!" I shouted at the television screen as he sat placidly across from Oprah. Have I, who proportionately share the same genetic mix as you, along with scores of other black folks, been a Negro all this time for nothing? We had to talk. Still, I was hopelessly enchanted; Tiger was flawed, but magic, and more magic for being flawed. He couldn't sing, but, like Bruce, he had a sheer force of person and could make things happen by lowering his eyes and wielding his golf club/guitar. I resolved to go out and buy all of Tiger's greatest hits. In too many years of romantic misfires and running myself through maturity checkpoints I had grown to miss hero worship, that eager sense of surrender, the mindless postering of bedroom walls with an adored male image. I started hunting for posters and fantasized about things I would never do, but that revived me merely because I considered them: Tatooing a Tiger heart on my arm, stowing away in his private plane.

N E X T_ P A G E: Tiger kicks ass