By TP O’Mahony
SEX is definitely off the menu in the Tiger Woods household this Christmas. And the new year could be erotically bleak as well for the world’s number one golfer.
The most remarkable sporting career of modern times is in freefall. Tiger Woods’s fall from grace has been spectacular – and nobody knows what lies ahead for the superstar of world golf.
We have been told by US celebrity magazine People that his wife, Elin Nordegren, is to stay with Tiger for the sake of her children, despite the growing list of mistresses her husband has allegedly dallied with.
The magazine has reported that the former Swedish model is herself a “child of divorce”; her parents split when she was six years old, and she does not want her children to go through the same experience. All very laudable. The Tammy Wynette hit song Stand By Your Man comes to mind, but for how long will Ms Nordegren stay loyal?
Mind you, the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton has survived the Monica Lewinsky scandal, just as the marriage of David and Victoria Beckham has held together in the aftermath of his sexual encounter with Rebecca Loos. In both of these cases, of course, there were serious political and commercial considerations in play.
It would be very foolish to say at this stage that there is to be no further sporting glory ahead for the man who is just four titles short of eclipsing Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors. And there is also an enormous corporate and sponsorship dimension to this. Very big bucks, indeed, mega-bucks in fact, are on the line here. And as we all know only too well, money talks.
Now that he has decided to put aside his golf clubs for an “indefinite period”, we can but speculate about his future. This much is clear though – his squeaky-clean image has been shattered forever by his infidelity. And the aura and mystique that surrounded him as one of the good guys of sport (I have just been looking at a photograph of President Barack Obama showing Woods around the Oval Office before that fateful car crash on 27 November) has also vanished.
He has taken time out to repair his marriage and rehabilitate his image. The first may be easier than the second. Whenever Tiger Woods returns to the golf course – and it is only a question of when, not if – he is going to find himself at the centre of another media feeding frenzy.
That’s the price one pays for being a celebrity these days and there is no way around that. True to his image as a man who fiercely guarded his privacy in the past, he combined a public apology for his behaviour with an impassioned plea for the right, even of superstars, to have a life free of media intrusion.
“No matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake, which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy,” said Tiger. He is right – even superstars have a right to privacy.
It is by virtue of his success on the golf course that Tiger Woods is a sports star, but also a celebrity. Since that car crash and the sensational revelations that followed, he has now become a different type of celebrity. The type the tabloids love.
This means, as Patricia Williams, professor of law at Columbia University said the other day, Tiger is now “entitled to whatever private life he can salvage”. That’s about as much as he can expect from here on.