Tiger Woods enters ... The Twilight Zone

If we are to believe the women who have claimed affairs with Tiger Woods (or even some of the women), Mr. Woods has been making holes-in-one all across America -- and perhaps the world.

The number of women who have come forward now numbers 14 -- which equals the number of major tournaments Mr. Woods has won in his 13-year pro career. Nice symmetry, that.

I had planned for this blog entry to be another of ridicule and humor, but the Woods saga has now entered the realm of The Twilight Zone. This guy's a seriously disturbed human being, a serial bigamist, a promiscuous of historical proportion, a tragic Greek figure, a sick man

The sickness he has forced upon himself now makes him the object of abject pity and disgust. If he had allowed himself one dishonesty to his wife and family and the business world, it would've showed a mind not capable of keeping focus momentarily, especially if he reconciled himself with that lapse and corrected it. We could've easily forgiven and wished him best once he got right with all of the above and himself.

But to regularly bed other women for years of marriage represents something so monstrous and so ethereally disembodied that one can only recoil in incredulity. It shows such a Leviathan disconnect with one's values and those one values that you seriously have to speculate as to the sanity of the individual. In each instance, he had to willfully block from his mind his wife, his children, his business promises, his charity and all whom he cared about and feigned honesty with. And then he had to live with it by suppressing all to his subconscious, which eats away at self-esteem and pride like parasitic wasp eggs inside young, live caterpillars.

In retrospect, as I've said before, one can see in Mr. Woods' behavior over the years the elusiveness, the ethereal traits, the personal distance, the robotic responses, the smug demeanor, the unctuous moralizing, the supercilious walk down the 18th fairway, the temper tantrums and verbal lashings, for what they are: the tangible products of a sickness, perhaps some pathology. He is Raskolnikov, but not seemingly the full fatalist or futilist or, of course, murderer.

I remember many hundreds of times being riveted by the above traits and wondering what must be inside the man's head, and thinking to myself: "I don't think HE knows what's inside his head." One can, indeed, extrapolate from evidence, but had I mentioned that something disturbing lay inside, people would've thought ME insane. "He's just got a lot of responsibilities," I would've been told. And, in fact, that was often said by TV and print commentators who tried to sum up Woods' distant demeanor. Of course, Jack Nicklaus and Michael Jordan had equal pressure and maintained healthy psyches and genuinely jolly spirits.

I, myself, have been within two feet of Mr. Woods many times as he has stridently loped between the crowd ropes in an affected, defensive fog with a look of some inner terror, as if being chased by some unseen Cheat Death. His demeanor in such times has been rationalized as "concentration," but it so apparently more than that, some distant inner-world of dread and misery.

Tiger woods was raised specifically to play golf, from the age of two, by his father. He was paraded before the world on the Mike Douglas Show at the age of two, carrying a tiny golf bag over his shoulders. It used to be a sweet moment caught on film that people gushed over. It now looks macabre, surreal, oppressive, exasperating. He was controlled a good deal by an overbearing father, like many of us, but Mr. Woods did not make the time to get away from the public eye to get his shit together; he did not TAKE the time to get his shit together. He has been on the path of destiny, manifest destiny -- his father's path first, like Mozart's. Are we ever to know if such children would choose such a path if given the opportunity? No. Greatness is nothing if it is not one's chosen path.

Mr. Wood's evangelical podium has been the 18th Green. It is my fond hope that he takes plenty of time now to seek out psychological help away from the madding crowd and find in him who he is. If I see such a man emerge, I will shed tears of joy, and he may become my new Jack Nicklaus or Michael Jordan. Godspeed.