Tiger must grow up – and his fans must let him
The Times, 3rd December 2009
Once sport was a way to build character, now it tries to eliminate it. So it’s no surprise when the cracks start to show.
TIMES COMMENT
It shouldn’t have taken a car crash, a swirl of internet rumours and a grudging apology to make us notice that something was seriously wrong with Tiger Woods. Witnessing him snap and snarl his way around a golf course was proof enough.
Even Woods’ two post-crash statements, worded as though written by a committee of lawyers, were appropriately tortured. “I’m human and I’m not perfect,” he wrote when the story broke on Sunday. Yesterday, in a kind of non-confession confession, he retreated to saying he is “a long way short of perfect”.
Now he tells us. Woods has been fighting the imperfections of humanity all his life. Being human demands weakness, vulnerability and unpredictability; Woods has always eschewed all three. His template has been half-god, half-machine — a god to his fans, a machine to himself. Who can be surprised that he is starting to crack under the strain?
Forget who did what to whom near a fire hydrant in Florida. The important question is why being so gloriously good at golf cannot even raise a smile out of Tiger Woods. The answer extends far beyond the world of sport.
It’s not all his fault. The sport industry delights in celebrating the elimination of weakness. Denying being human has become professionalism’s raison d’être. Coaches prefer willing cogs in a wheel, sponsors want shiny faces on billboards, governing bodies seek stars without opinions. And if the agents and coaches can’t quite eliminate what’s left of your personality, there are always the sports psychologists to finish the job. We have come full circle. Once sport was a means of building character; now it seeks to eliminate character.
As a grudging genius, Woods has been the apotheosis of modern professionalism. There is no joy in Woods’ golf, let alone (it would seem) his private life. He interacts with the sporting public as little a possible, as though fans are an unnecessary encumbrance rather than the lifeblood of sport. Those who once criticised Don Bradman for being a machine knew nothing of Tiger Woods. He plays sport as though his own humanity is something to be rebutted rather than embraced.
Some sportsmen affect coldness as a competitive mask. With Woods, you sense it goes all the way to his core, as if personality is a form of weakness, a flaw to be ironed out of his game like a faulty backswing.
Did it have to be this way? Woods has always seemed predestined, but we once hoped for a better kind of destiny. A dozen years ago he won his first major by the huge margin of 12 shots, at the conservative Augusta National club, deep in the American South. Here, we hoped, was a handsome young black sportsman who would catapult America’s least multicultural sport into a more liberal future.
But far from being a brave new dawn, Woods’ career has merely exacerbated what was wrong with the way sportsmen are held up as role models. The Woods legend has entrenched the cult of professional obsession, the Malcolm Gladwell view that anyone can be a genius so long as they practise for 10,000 hours. Woods has been the ultimate pin-up boy for that way of life. It’s long overdue for a serious rethink.
The Woods PR machine has also indulged the myth of sporting exceptionalism. Mistaking mere winners for supermen shortchanges everyone. Brilliant sportsman, whatever they may tell you, are a lot like everyone else. Yes, sportsmen have to make sacrifices to get to the top; yes, there is a lot of pressure when they get there; yes, it’s a tough life. So is being a great surgeon, so is being a great teacher, so is being a great actor. The pursuit of excellence, whatever the discipline, demands bravery and dedication. Sporting exceptionalism — that sport is a special realm populated by a superbreed — is a myth sold to gullible fans to boost TV viewing figures.
There are also limits to human specialisation. Both capitalism and professionalism converge in encouraging the pursuit of doing one thing very well. But no job, least of all playing a game, should dominate your life to the point where it becomes a joyless exercise in self-denial. Doing only one thing for ever, without ever wondering if it can be entirely fulfilling, suits very few human beings.
It is a practical point as well as a moral one. Excessive narrowness isn’t just bad for you as a person, it’s bad for you as a performer. When I was captain of Middlesex, I used to dread seeing overkeen young cricketers reading Tiger Woods books. The Tiger approach, by legitimising introspective obsessiveness, nearly always made them play worse on the field. The monomania of Tiger Woods or Geoff Boycott doesn’t work for many people. Now we are learning that it isn’t even working for Tiger Woods.
And anyway, surely one day it is only natural that golfers must fall out of love with golf. Tiger does not owe it to his fans to keep winning; his fans owe it to Tiger that they don’t demand that he ruins his life in the pursuit of hitting a golf ball. Tiring of sport should be considered an essential part of growing up, a human badge of honour, not a cause for reproach. Professional sport is stuck in a dangerous state of arrested development where it demands that grown adults indefinitely retain the egotistical narrow-mindedness of teenagers.
Let’s hope Woods’ unravelling prompts a shift in mood. So far he has been the standard-bearer for our age of professionalism: workaholic relentlessness, nothing left to chance, the elimination of emotion, it’s only the winning that counts, say nothing, follow the endorsements. Throughout that grim and joyless narrative, Woods has found the orthodoxy of professionalism to be all too willing an accomplice.
Now it is time for Act II, not only for Tiger, but for the way we think about success. It’s time we all grew up — and allowed sportsmen to do the same.
ED SMITH IS A FORMER ENGLAND CRICKETER. HE IS NOW A LEADER WRITER AT THE TIMES.