Is Tiger Woods’ dad a racist?
BY SUSAN ZAKIN
(06/18/99)
Your article on Earl Woods should have been titled “Is
Earl Woods a Bigot?” By definition Earl Woods can’t be a racist. These days, racism is most commonly defined by
folks who work in the movement to fight racism as race prejudice combined with the application of power. By that definition, no black
person, including Earl Woods, can be a racist. That said, Earl Woods could be a bigot. He could have prejudices about various people, including
Scots — he wouldn’t be the first — but I agree with the author in that I don’t think his quips about Scottish weather are bigotry.
The mainstream media’s obsession with finding bigotry in people of color is
approaching the ridiculous. Jesse Jackson still suffers for one remark he
made 15 years ago, which he has apologized for numerous times. White
members of Congress make bigoted remarks about various groups (gays, the
NAACP, Muslims, women) on a regular basis and are allowed to mumble
halfhearted apologies and walk away. Nitpicking, you
say. No — it’s very important that white America come to terms with the fact
that when we talk about racism, we have met the enemy, and he is us.
– Eric Oines
Minneapolis
Oh, please, somebody stop this train before it gets to Sillyville! How
many people know there is crappy weather in Scotland? How many of us would
be out there, swinging a silly metal club at a little white ball in bitter,
biting cold and windy weather when we could be sitting inside, warm and
toasty, listening to jazz and drinking rum? Race has nothing to do with
that. Common sense sounds closer to the truth.
I think the author said it best herself: “the tone of white frat boys whining
about affirmative action to excuse their own mediocrity.” These people have probably been festering for a long time, waiting for Tiger or his dad to say something so that they can use it and vindicate Fuzzy for his comments.
Will white men ever stop being angry? Maybe that is the key to equality. Or
do we all have to be angry, too? Sounds too ridiculous to me.
– Brenda Brody
If Earl Woods had been white and made his comments about Africa instead of
Scotland, he would have been crucified in the media, so the answer is yes,
he is a racist. That Susan Zakin does not understand this and indeed
further compounds her hypocrisy with the sexist and racist crack about
“angry white frat boys” shows she has no business being a serious
journalist.
– John Dinkeloo
My magical movie mystery tour
BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
(06/16/99)
At last, Camille Paglia has clarified her bewildering claim to have the
mind of a man. Turns out she doesn’t have the noggin of your average
Joe six-pack, though, but that of a “pre-Stonewall gay man.”
Putting aside the unexpected revelation that all pre-Stonewall guys
thought alike, it occurs to me that Paglia’s time travels can be a
source of great comfort for us post-Stonewall gay guys. For example,
who knew that the guy who was dragged outside and thrown into a paddy
wagon for having the crust to enter an illegal gay bar could soothe his
pain by reflecting on Rosalind Russell’s wacky brilliance in “Auntie
Mame”? Even better, on his first Christmas away from the
family that no longer wanted anything to do with him, a pre-Stonewall
gay guy had only to attend a Marilyn Monroe movie in an empty theater
and join the pagan celebration of female sexuality to make everything
better.
Paglia’s startling insight will change everything. I mean, who could
have guessed that the discussion in pre-Stonewall gay bars centered on
an effete, snobbish bitch fight in academia over structuralism that has
absolutely no relevance to the real world? Man, oh man. Us modern gay
dudes got rooked.
– Bernard Gundy
San Francisco
Only the Shadow knows
BY JAKE TAPPER
(06/18/99)
The tragedy is that Bob Woodward — one of America’s great investigative
journalists and a man who made history with his Watergate reporting — now
wastes his talent on inconsequential, inside-the-Beltway accounts of
political ephemera.
I reluctantly concluded after interviewing Woodward for my 1996 “Frontline”documentary “Why America Hates the Press,”
that he has become little more than a stenographer
to power — a palace scribe. His reporting is almost irrelevant to the rest of the country.
Did anyone actually manage to read his book “The Choice,” about the
Clinton-Dole race? It was stupefyingly dull and almost completely devoid of
meaning for anyone outside official Washington. Remember the hook for that
tome — that Hillary consulted Eleanor Roosevelt in a “seance”? Now that was
a real contribution to our understanding of the American political system.
Tapper makes a passing reference to Woodward’s book on Dan Quayle, but
neglects to mention that the book is so shallow and such an embarrassment –
it was a pathetic attempt to convince readers that then Vice President
Quayle had matured in office and was worthy of serious consideration for the
presidency — that it has conveniently disappeared from lists of Woodward’s
published works.
Some day I hope Woodward will return to the days when he pierced the
secrecy of the Nixon White House, the Supreme Court and the CIA. Until then
I’ll skip his “insider” accounts of Washington talking to itself. As Jake Tapper’s friend says, “Who cares?”
– Stephen Talbot
Presidents since Nixon have lived in the shadow of Watergate. Indeed, as
Woodward wrote: “The presidency has changed.” But so has the press. So,
judging from his “larger thesis,” has Woodward.
When Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the abuse of government power
known as Watergate, reporters followed a simple rule: A public figure’s
private life was private, unless public responsibilities are affected.
Today, Woodward asserts, presidents must tell the reporters everything “from
policies to their personal lives to foreign policy to pardons.” Policies
are public, so are pardons and foreign policies. But private lives?
Woodward is not alone. His paper, the Washington Post, played a
major role in giving the nation a year of Monica. Michael Isikoff’s keyhole journalism garnered various journalism awards, but never linked President Clinton’s dismaying personal behavior with his public responsibilities.
“This was not Watergate,” Isikoff wrote in his book. Indeed it wasn’t.
– Peter Donhowe
Editor, TV & Politics Watch
Champaign, Ill.
Jake Tapper is correct to focus on the accuracy of Bob Woodward’s work. Insofar as public figures are concerned, a reporter really has only one obligation, which is to get the story right. Woodward has done this, so there simply is no “ethical” case against him, period.
I consider Woodward to be a national asset. Without him, we might not have a historical record in our age of shredders, spin and cover-your-ass. I’m glad he’s on the scene, and that he does his work without regard to those jealous ants who occasionally try to throw stones at success.
– Charles Pluckhahn
Newton, Mass.
Inside the Starr chamber
BY JACK HITT
(06/17/99)
One scarcely knows what to make of it when Jack Hitt characterizes Kenneth
Starr’s distinction between the office of the U.S. presidency and its
present occupant as “curious.” Is this not the stuff of elementary-school
civics classes?
In making judgments about the impeachment debacle, there is a principle
that might profitably be kept in mind. The process of impeachment
ostensibly exists in order to keep in check presidents who misuse the power
of the office — not to check the freedom that every person, president or
not, has to lie, dissemble or abuse the truth for personal gain, an art
which Bill Clinton has plainly mastered. Such acts are the small beer of
Washington political life, the grease that keeps the political wheels
spinning.
If Kenneth Starr, the media (including Salon) and the U.S. political
establishment generally were not hopelessly in thrall to the image of the
president’s penis, they might have opened their eyes to the real and
substantial (not to mention impeachable) abuses of executive power that
Bill Clinton has committed for personal gain. Among these are the criminal
attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan which took place in the aftermath of the
African embassy bombings. But it is little wonder that such a thoroughly
compromised president can remain in power when he has publications like
Salon around to blur the distinction between the man and the office.
– Lorne Beaton
Hitt misses the point as he paraphrases Bob Woodward’s latest book, “Shadow,” to find
more ammo to harangue Ken Starr. Hitt may even have a point that Starr made mistakes; even Starr admits to this. Yet it was not Ken Starr that caused this mess
and it was not Ken Starr that even started the impeachment process.
Hitt should realize that Ken Starr’s mistakes — made in an effort to do his job
against a White House spinning in an all-out effort to stop him — will never be
as bad as Clinton’s.
I guess only the Shadow knows.
– Ira S. Stevens
Back in February, I was probably the last person left on earth who had trouble identifying Tiger Woods, the golfing phenomenon who won the Master’s tournament in 1997 at the age of 21. I’ve spent the last decade in the sheltered world of environmental politics and the only sport I really know about is the blood sport commonly known as an election.
But I’ve always had a secret desire to go Hollywood, and an editor at Icon magazine decided to try me out by having me interview Tiger Woods’ father, Earl, reasoning that a bona fide reporter might get him to say something interesting.
The night before the interview, I went to a local Border’s Books cafe and speed-read — but didn’t buy — the most recent of Earl Woods’ autobiographies. I was relieved to find there was more than advice about improving your swing. With a Thai mother and a black father who also claims Chinese and Native American blood, Tiger Woods is the sports equivalent of a Benetton ad. And his father had a lot to say. Earl’s book, “Playing Through,” forced me to think more carefully about the racism faced by African-Americans of my parents’ generation, who came before black power but after the worst of Jim Crow.
And Earl Woods was a jazz fan.
OK, I thought. I can do this.
Earl was a good interview, wittier than I expected, a bit pompous at times, but very intelligent. We talked for about two hours on the telephone.
For the article, I selected quotes that emphasized the themes I found most interesting: the creative similarities between jazz and golf, and Earl’s experiences with racism compared to Tiger’s milder ones, and a funny — I thought — riff on the awful weather in Scotland, golf’s heartland, which Woods insisted was a worse place to play the game than Africa.
I turned the piece in and I forgot about the whole thing.
That is, until Monday, when I got a frantic message from a reporter from Golf World. The magazine had zeroed in on the Scotland joke, which it deemed racist. Here’s what Earl said about Scotland (Icon tightened it up a tad):
“That’s for white people. It’s the heart of golf for people who came from there. It sucks as far as I’m concerned. It is the sorriest weather and I’ve made the public statement that people had better be happy that the Scots lived there instead of soul brothers. The game of golf would have never been invented. We would have been inside listening to jazz and we wouldn’t have been stupid enough to go out in that weather and play a silly-ass game and freeze yourself to death. We would have been inside laughing and joking with rum and stuff. Now, Africa … I played golf in Africa and I knew I was home.”
Golf World wanted to equate his remarks with those of Fuzzy Zoeller, who became a sports world pariah in 1997 for joking that Tiger Woods would serve fried chicken and collard greens at the next Master’s dinner.
I knew about as much about Fuzzy Zoeller as I had known about Tiger Woods. But I had to say something, because Earl was denying that he said this to me; in fact, he was denying that he had even given the interview. Of course, I had the tape to prove it.
The next thing I knew, I was giving a sound bite. “Earl Woods has paid his dues,” I told the Golf World guy. “He’s entitled to crack a joke.”
Golf World’s piece closed with my quote and the following kicker: “Isn’t that what Fuzzy Zoeller said?”
Oy. Over at Icon, the publicity folks were going into overdrive. “You sounded great,” one told me as I cringed on the other side of the telephone line. “Believe me, this is my business. I’ve got USA Today calling you.”
“But I want to talk about context,” I said feebly.
Yeah, right.
I felt sorry for Woods, until the publicity guy reminded me that he was attacking my professional credibility and lying to save his ass at my expense. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t remember talking to me. Maybe.
I listened to the tape I’d made of our conversation. After Earl finished his Scotland rap, I heard myself mentioning that he was awfully plainspoken for someone who had done 20 years in the military. I think I even called him “sir.”
“That’s my biggest problem,” was Woods’ response. “I’m honest. I tell the truth. And people can’t handle that.” He actually went on about this for some time.
OK, I thought. Maybe I’m pissed off enough to ride this little PR pony out the gate. After all, I have a book to promote. About an hour later, I lobbed off a quote to USA Today. This one wasn’t quite as dumb. Instead, it was revoltingly self-serving, and syntactically moronic. “Journalists tend to oversimplify race,” I said. “This article didn’t do that. It’s unfortunate that Earl Woods, a guy who’s paid a lot of dues, feels that he has to duck and cover because of a media feeding frenzy.”
Whoa, baby. Block that metaphor.
The so-called feeding frenzy abated by afternoon, when the East Coast closed down. When I actually had time to think about it, the whole thing seemed farcical.
First, what Fuzzy Zoeller said was racist — and it wasn’t funny. What Earl said wasn’t racist — and it was funny. Earl wasn’t saying anything bad about Scots. He was just saying that Scotland has lousy weather. Does anyone except for seagulls and lobsters consider this debatable?
If anything, Earl’s comments stereotyped blacks. But Richard Pryor and Chris Rock have proved that blacks can say things about blacks that whites simply can’t.
The tone of the Golf World story was that of angry white frat boys who blame affirmative action for their own mediocrity.
But the truly lousy part is that the subtlety in my conversation with Earl Woods was lost. Like typical strangers, we talked about the weather. Earl already knew from our conversation — about New York, about jazz — that like him, I wouldn’t be caught dead playing golf in that freezing Scottish rain. I’d be inside listening to jazz and drinking rum. And, like him, I’d rather be in Africa, anyway. He was being charming by including me in the company of “soul brothers.”
I was only slightly mad at Earl, even though he’d essentially called me a liar. I kind of liked the guy when I interviewed him. Plus, I thought his remarks were innocuous.
I also had the slightly uncomfortable feeling that I was benefitting from the whole thing by having my name splashed all over the media. My editors at Icon were even talking about sending me to interview a movie star. Hey, I thought, even a serious reporter can benefit from a good old-fashioned media shit-storm.
Of course, I hadn’t completely abandoned my environmental roots. I had asked Earl if he thought golf courses should be urged to use reclaimed water, but his answer hadn’t made it into the piece.
“Why not?” he answered. “Just don’t put the golf ball in your mouth.”
Right about now, I suspect that Earl may be wishing he put a golf ball in his own mouth, rather than make that joke about Scotland.
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.
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.
