TIGER WOODS oozed sincerity, contrition and remorse. After three months’ silence, the world’s top golfer stood before the hand-picked audience of relatives and friends at the Sawgrass Clubhouse in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. True to his reputation as a control freak, he allowed only three wire agency reporters to attend, and took no questions.
Across America, millions were watching. The glassy, brown eyes stared into the camera, not quite tear-filled. His voice almost broke when he said: “For all that I have done, I am so sorry. I have a lot to atone for.”
The effect was somewhere between a presidential address and a show trial: the pose at the lectern, blue shirt and blazer, against a royal blue curtain. Tiger stood convicted by the court of public opinion. After the first, written confession of adultery, on his website in December, the golfer’s popularity rating fell from 85 to 33 per cent.
That first confession spoke of “transgressions”. This time, he was more clear: “I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated.” Tiger’s wife, Elin, wasn’t in the room, but she may have watched on television. He spoke her name 10 times in 14 minutes. “My real apology to her will not come in the form of words. It will come from my behaviour over time,” he said. He denied speculation that Elin attacked him with a golf club at Thanksgiving. “Elin never hit me that night or any other night,” Tiger said defensively.
The confession had all the ingredients of American drama: “core values”, religion, the fall from grace, redemption, and – to hear the endless commentary that followed – forgiveness. “I was moved,” said the African-American radio talk show host Armstrong Williams. “The public will overwhelmingly forgive him.” Statistics show that 50 per cent of married people cheat, so why was America so fascinated? It was the hubris, the way a man who had youth, talent, fame, fortune, a beautiful wife and children, so wantonly risked it. The reminder that we all carry the seeds of our own self-destruction. “You can’t have 17 different women around the country and not expect it to explode,” chided Armstrong Williams.
Tiger gave us the beginning of an explanation. “I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply . . . I thought only about myself . . . I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to . . . I felt I was entitled.”
It was a world class performance. We wanted to believe it. But despite Tiger’s praise of therapy and supportive peers, we felt certain he wouldn’t have been there if he hadn’t been caught, that a Tiger doesn’t change his stripes.