Tiger Woods

Oscar Wilde once said “Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.” Never was that more true than this past week. As both a golfer and an admirer of Tiger Woods, I have this to say about Tiger’s admitted “transgressions,” It’s none of my business. Steve Stricker, his friend and fellow golf professional put it best: “I don't think it's really any of our business to get inside his private life. But it all drives us to want to learn more, I guess, and I don't know if that's right or wrong. But I respect what he's doing. You know, he's trying to make it as private as he can, and it's just hard because everybody is trying to get a piece of information on really what happened. But we may never know, and I really don't care. I don't really want to know. It's too bad that it happened and that it happened at this time.”

By Sam DelPresto

Tiger at Turnberry

How good does a man have to be to have his failures become a leading news story? This past week, Tiger Woods failed to make the cut at the Open Golf Championship at the Turnberry golf club in Scotland. Despite Tom Watson’s valiant effort and near victory at age 59, the top story of this year’s British Open (as we refer to it here in the US) was Wood’s failure to make it to the weekend. He has made 231 cuts in the 246 events he has entered. (www.sports.espn.go.com/golf/britishopen09/news/story?id=4337152)

I’m always aware of the privilege it is to be able to watch Tiger at work. It may be as close as one gets to watching perfection, not unlike, I imagine, what it must have been like to watch Michelangelo paint. To borrow a line from Oscar Levant, Tiger Woods “is a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined.”

By Sam DelPresto