'The Passion of Tiger Woods'

On the Friday following Thanksgiving in 2009, Tiger Woods had an automobile accident. For someone who does not follow golf, the headlines that ran that weekend provided exactly as much information as it seemed necessary to have. Over the following week, I noticed a few more headlines, but they made no impression. Some part of the brain is charged with the task of filtering the torrent of signals that bombard it from the media every day. And it did its job with reasonable efficiency, at least for a while.

Some sort of frenzy was underway. It became impossible to tune this out entirely. I began to ignore it in a more deliberate way. (All due respect to the man for his talent and accomplishments, but the doings of Tiger Woods were exactly as interesting to me as mine would be to him.) There should be a word for the effort to avoid giving any attention to some kerfuffle underway in the media environment. “Fortified indifference,” perhaps. It’s like gritting your teeth, except with neurons.

But the important thing about my struggle in 2009 is that it failed. Within six weeks of the accident, I had a rough sense of the whole drama in spite of having never read a single article on the scandal, nor watched nor listened to any news broadcasts about it. The jokes, allusions, and analogies spinning off from the event made certain details inescapable. A kind of cultural saturation had occurred. Resistance was futile. The whole experience was irritating, even a little depressing, for it revealed the limits of personal autonomy in the face of an unrelenting media system, capable of imposing utterly meaningless crap on everybody’s attention, one way or another.

But perhaps that’s looking at things the wrong way. Consider the perspective offered by Orin Starn in The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal (Duke University Press). Starn, the chair of cultural anthropology at Duke, maintains that the events of two years back were not meaningless at all. If anything, they were supercharged with cultural significance.

The book's title alludes to the theatrical reenactments of Christ’s suffering performed at Easter during the middle ages, or at least to Mel Gibson’s big-screen rendition thereof. Starn interprets “Tigergate” as an early 21st-century version of the scapegoating rituals analyzed by René Girard. From what I recall of Girardian theory, the reconsolidation of social order involves the scapegoat being slaughtered, rather than paying alimony, though in some cases that may be too fine a distinction.

The scandal was certainly louder and more frenetic than the game that Woods seems have been destined to master. The first image of him in the book shows him at the age of two, appearing on "The Mike Douglas Show" with his father. He is dressed in pint-sized golfing garb, with a little bag of clubs over his shoulder. As with a very young Michael Jackson, the performance of cuteness now reads as a bit creepy. Starn does not make the comparison, but it’s implicit, given the outcome. “This toddler was not to be one of those child prodigies who flames out under unbearable expectations,” Starn writes. “By his early thirties, he was a one-man multinational company…. Forbes magazine heralded Woods as the first athlete to earn $1 billion.”

Starn, who mentions that he is a golfer, is also a scholar of the game, which he says “has always traced the fault lines of conflict, hierarchy, and tension in America, among them the archetypal divides of race and class.” To judge by my friend Dave Zirin’s book A People’s History of Sports in the United States (The New Press) that’s true of almost any athletic pursuit, even bowling. But the salient point about Woods is that most of his career has been conducted as if no such fault lines existed. Starn presents some interesting and little-known information on how golf was integrated. But apart from his genius on the green, Woods’s “brand” has been defined by its promise of harmony: “He and his blonde-haired, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed the poster couple for a shiny new postracial America with their two young children, two dogs, and the fabulous riches of Tiger’s golfing empire.”

Each of his parents had a multiracial background -- black, white, and Native American on his father’s side; Chinese, Thai, and Dutch on his mother’s. “Cablinasian,” the label Woods made up to name his blended identity, is tongue-in-cheek, but it also represents a very American tendency to mess with the established categories of racial identity by creating an ironic mask. (Ralph Ellison wrote about in his essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.”)

But that mask flew off, so to speak, when his car hit the fire hydrant in late 2009. Starn fills out his chronicle of the scandal that followed with an examination of the conversation and vituperation that took place online, often in the comments sections of news articles -- with numerous representative samples, in all their epithet-spewing, semiliterate glory. The one-drop rule remains in full effect, it seems, even for Cablinasians.

“For all the ostensible variety of opinion,” Stern writes about the cyberchatter, “there was something limited and predictable about the complaints, stereotypes, and arguments and counterarguments, as if we were watching a movie we’d already seen many times before. Whether [coming from] the black woman aggrieved with Tiger about being with white women or the white man bitter about supposed black privilege, we already knew the lines, or at least most of them.… We are all players, like it or not, in a modern American kabuki theater of race, where our masks too often seem to be frozen into a limited set of expressions.”

Same as it ever was, then. But this is where the comparison to a scapegoating ritual falls apart. (Not that it’s developed very much in any case.) At least in Girard’s analysis, the ritual is an effort to channel and purge the conflicts within a society – reducing its tensions, restoring its sense of cohesion and unity, displacing the potential for violence by administering a homeopathic dose of it. Nothing like that can be said to have happened with Tigergate. It involved no catharsis. For that matter, it ran -- by Starn’s own account -- in exactly the opposite direction: the golfer himself symbolized harmony and success and the vision of historical violence transcended with all the sublime perfection of a hole-in-one. The furor of late 2009 negated all of that. The roar was so load that it couldn’t be ignored, even if you plugged your ears and looked away.

The latest headlines indicate that Tiger Woods is going to play the Pebble Beach Pro-Am tournament next month, for the first time in a decade. Meanwhile, his ex-wife has purchased a mansion for $12 million and is going to tear it down. She is doing so because of termites, or so go the reports. Hard to tell what symbolic significance that may have. But under the circumstances, wiping out termites might not be her primary motivation for destroying something incredibly expensive.