Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!
Did ... you ... see ... it? Tiger Woods annexed entire quadrants of outer space (his original home) to insert long empty pauses between normal words, so that the phrase "this is between a husband and his wife" actually took 3.75 millennia to speak and comprised the creation of five new religions.
It was like being transported back 10 years to the early days of corporate robotic answering machines, with their staccato repetition and bizarre intonation on wrong syllables and pieces of sentences. "Please wait, someBOdy will BE with YOU in a moMENT."
Tiger Woods was a man going through the motions during his 14-minute mea culpa to the world in Florida yesterday (which I'd begged him not to do). I kept thinking, "Where the hell is Jeff Dunham?" the ventriloquist. Words kept coming in staccato measure from Tiger's lips, but nobody was home, except some ethereal voice locked deep inside and intoning platitudes fed to it by some diminutive Shrink while the puffy eyes and puffy face moved from side to side (think Pink Floyd's "Us and Them" on those last five words).
Chilling! Sad! Distressing! Disturbing! Surreal!
Many people interviewed worldwide afterward said they felt they didn't get to see HIM, that he should've taken questions from an audience so they could've seen spontaneity, some feeling, some emotions, SOMETHING. You have to wonder at a man who decides he must apologize to the whole freaking world and yet doesn't give the whole freaking world HIMSELF. What's the use? What's the purpose? It's easy to ask forgiveness from those you haven't even done anything to. ... Too easy. It's childish.
We got a hint of the small, screaming boy inside from one particular snippet: "I felt that I'd worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me." Paraphrased: "My father made a slave of me and I just wanted to LIVE!" His father pushed young Tiger nearly every day from the age of 2 to play golf and be the best at golf, with Tiger's own ambitions and desires taking a back seat. The boy never became the man. He became what his father wanted. Cheap psychology? Yeah. And I won't charge a penny for being right.
When people grow up living their lives for others' values and demands, they do not know how to properly find their own and become accountable for their own, thereby becoming promiscuous in value seeking. And they almost always seek some sort of "spiritual security."
Enter Buddhism in Tiger's talk. (This is where the pathetic became pathological.) He'd been practicing his "faith" from childhood but had drifted away (toward a dozen or more women's bedrooms outside of his marital bed). He claimed that Buddhism teaches him "to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint." How's that for patchwork morality. "I'm not going to go down that road or that road or that road even though I WANT to 'cause Buddha says it ain't no good at all and it will piss off my sponsors."
Tiger finished his remote control with, "I ask you to find it in your heart to believe in me again."
Actually, in my heart, I wish Jack Nicklaus were still around. These new-generation man-boys who feel the need for public expiation and tepid emoting are costing me a fortune in vomit bags.
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