One hundred seconds. That is how long it lasts. First, you hear the voice of Earl Woods, and a prophecy for his son. That would transcend the game of golf. A prophecy that would come true in more ways than one. And then within 100 seconds of starting Tiger, the new HBO documentary, you see Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer of all time, moving at a frigid pace, dragging his bare feet to the back of the room where his picture will be taken.
You’ve seen the mugshot photo. You know the history, and everything that happened before. In 2009, Tiger Woods screwed up his shit and we all found out about it. He cheated on his wife. Much. It caused a lot of people pain. Above all, without doubt, to his wife, Elin Nordegren. Also safe for the more than a dozen women with whom he was simultaneously intimate. People who paid him a lot of money so as not to ruin his reputation. The friends and colleagues that he eliminated from his life after it was all over. It was all very embarrassing. Disappointing.
And in the twelve years since the news broke, Tiger Woods has been the sole defendant in the Tiger Woods case before the court of public opinion. But now, with Tiger, his life and his career are once again under the microscope. And after watching the documentary, I realized that after Woods’ missteps, something a little more unsettling was happening than infidelity. A dark cloud that swelled. And it was right there in front of us the whole time, because we’re all a little bit responsible for it.
The directors of the film, Matthew Heineman (Cartel land) and Matthew Hamache (Amanda Knox), you know what most people want to see in a documentary about Tiger. The mugshot photo, the mistresses, the accident scene, the weirdest press conference you’ve ever seen until Donald Trump took over the White House meeting room. Yes, archival stuff, unreleased footage, green jackets, Eldrick’s perfect swing when he was just a kid, and of course, when he was able to compete in the US Open with a broken leg. But first things first. And the truth is that Tiger it has everything.
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With the lifting of the press embargo on the documentary, members of the Big Cat coalition did not take a good look at Woods’ transgressions. Some claim that the documentary depicts Woods’ life as a tragedy, others claim that it is a merciless attack and one letter written by despised and spiteful lovers. Surely your complaint is not about the inclusion of the scandal, but about the idea that the documentary spends too much time on it. There are people with outstanding debts, no doubt. But everyone involved tells their stories with sadness rather than anger. Rachel Uchitel, the woman at the center of it all, breaks her silence. Steve Williams, his former caddy, describes being abruptly abandoned by Woods. Dina Gravell, his high school sweetheart, details the sudden end of their relationship, orchestrated by Woods’ parents. No one who appears in the documentary says anything libelous. They tell their experiences as they lived them. Including these anecdotes does not stain Woods’ legacy any more than his demeanor already has. In fact, the documentary’s investment in the scandal, and the opportunity to rewatch it in a modern context, gives the world – both people who adore Tiger and those who hate him – the opportunity to reexamine the protagonists most unfortunate of the saga. There is a tragedy in this story. But Tiger Woods is not the greatest villain of Tiger. Members of the tabloid press and those who harassed women at the center of the story are the ones who get that dubious credit.
Public delight at Woods’ failures made matters worse. That is what happens when you work in the media. When something works, and it keeps working, you can’t stop. Sales, web clicks, attention to your stories, sales at newsstands … are all highly addictive drugs. You have to feed the machine, and no matter what they say, your defense is that the public is asking for it. Sensitivity is doomed. In that sense, you can understand, functionally, why the media was in such intense persecution while the number of women who came forward claiming to have had a relationship with Woods continued to increase. They could justify any story based on the insatiable appetite of the public. Is someone’s life improved by knowing what a sex addict Tiger Woods seemed to be? You can answer that for yourself, but you should also ask yourself how this frenzy could affect the lives of the people who are the true victims of the story. Namely, Elin Nordegren, Sam and Charlie Woods, and the women who fell seduced by Woods’ spells.
The character who embodies the “Boss of all the bad guys” in the story of Tiger Woods, according to how he can be recognized by the public in that sense, is presented in the second part of the documentary. His name is Neal Boulton, a former editor of the National Enquirer. The way it is presented, and the ways of working it recounts, speak for themselves.
“The Tiger Woods story is a great cautionary tale,” begins Boulton. “Be careful with the image you create of yourself. Be careful with lies. Be very, very careful. Because everything could fall apart. National Enquirer he had a history of just smearing people. They knew that the American public loved to see the failures of their famous people. And so they fed that appetite with a vengeance. “
Boulton gloats as he utters these words. As if pleasing and fueling the worst impulses of the American public was something to be proud of. And that’s exactly what he did Enquirer. Worse still, Boulton happily recalls the story of a reporter who followed Woods and a woman into a parking lot, and who recovered a discarded tampon to demand a ransom in case he denied the affair. These people didn’t stop, even after pouring gasoline on the fire that Woods himself started. The story of his affair with Uchitel is what set in motion Woods’ own personal Armageddon, which began with the famous incident around his home. What followed was disgusting, and arguably even compounded by a racial issue. Here’s Bryant Gumbel’s take on what happened next:
“One of the things that was often talked about in black homes, was that when something happened, someone older than you would say, ‘I hope it’s not black. I hope it’s not black.’ Because you knew it would give fuel and stuff. to those people who wanted to see you as something much less than them. It was going to be used against you. All those people who really didn’t like Tiger, and who tried to find reasons to bring him down, and reasons to say that he was not? This and wasn’t that? Now they were going to have their moment. ”
And then we got to the point where Billy Payne, former president of the Augusta National Golf Club, believed it was his time to publicly punish Woods in front of all the media before his return to the tournament. In the documentary, the journalist from LA Times Thomas Bonk calls it “a public beating”, adding that something like this would not have happened had he been one of the many white champions of the tournament. Bonk points to the press as evidence of a racist background that Augusta had not yet overcome. Proponents of “Stick to Sports” might have been right on this.
“What Billy Payne did at Augusta was disgusting,” says Gumbel. “Tiger’s family, his wife, had a right to be angry, disappointed, upset. Not the president of a bloody golf club. Who the hell are you?”
It gave the Americans a reason to remain pissed off at Tiger Woods.
This story was always going to be news. It was, sadly, and because of America’s culture of a taste for rot and things that go wrong, newsworthy. The story was always going to affect his relationships with sponsors and his mental health. Even those who like to separate careers from personal lives would have a difficult time defending their career as an athlete. All of this would have happened regardless of the media coverage. But that relentless pursuit of the moment of revenge that Gumbel describes pushed Woods’ wife, and all the women Woods cheated on, into a well of scrutiny that none of them deserved. They were already the victims. Not Woods. His infidelity and behavior caused her pain. It was bad enough. And then it got worse. “Are you a fan of the song ‘Oh Baby I Like It Raw’?” A paparazzi yells at Uchitel as he leaves his house. “I think you should get tested, sexually transmitted diseases are a problem,” says another. Uchitel describes it as the end of his life as he knew it. Nordegren was forced to raise her two young children in hiding as the media looked for ways to further publicly embarrass her.
Nordegren didn’t deserve that. Neither does Uchitel. But the media took advantage of it. And the paparazzi too. “What do you think of her 14 lovers?” they yelled at Nordegren. “There’s an epidemic of gold digging whores in this country,” Bill Burr said of Nordegren’s divorce settlement. Joy Behar took advantage of this when she called Uchitel a “prostitute” in The View and Jay Leno took advantage of it with his accountant “How many women has Tiger Woods hooked up with?” We take advantage of that. Because we made it possible with our attention.
Boulton calls it “Great American Entertainment.” It is frustratingly accurate.
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