Tiger turns cheetah

Welcome back to the real world, Tiger!

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OPINION: YOU KNOW golf has changed when John Daly starts making sense.

You know the world has tilted when the subject on which he shows unusual perception is morality.

Daly has lost more wives than he's won major championships, which kind of makes him the spiritual leader of golfers who have lost their way.

But the man who gave us "nicotine plus caffeine equals protein" has some advice for the once-perfect one.

Tiger Woods might not want to hear marital guidance from a man who can claim four ex-wives, but anyone who shaves his mullet for charity is surely a man to be respected.

And, on the subject of infidelity, listened to.

"The thing that Tiger needs to look at," Daly said this week, "is, whatever happened, just tell the truth."

Daly understood, as we all understood, that nothing good is ever behind a car crash just metres from your front door at 2.25 on a Friday morning.

When emergency crews arrived they found damage of varying degrees to a car, a hydrant, a golfer and a marriage. As far as we know, only the hydrant has so far been fixed.

But Daly wasn't talking about Tiger being truthful with his wife. He was telling him to be honest with his fans and, after almost a week in which gossip and speculation had happily filled the vacuum, finally he was. Though not before we had all been treated to the tastelessness of a man begging his mistress to destroy the evidence of his betrayal.

"Hey, it's, uh, it's Tiger. I need you to do a huge favour," he told Los Angeles cocktail waitress Jaimee Grubbs. "Can you please take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone and may be calling you." I'm still not sure which was more distasteful; Tiger making the call, or the woman with an appropriate name releasing it. For the sake of fairness, let's call it a tie.

When Forbes magazine told us this year that Tiger Woods had just become the world's first billionaire sportsman, many of us marvelled at what he had, and overlooked what he did not.

We kept seeing all those zeroes and forgot they mean nothing.

You see, what Tiger does not have and, to an enormous degree, has never had, is a private life.

Since the age of two, when he was seen putting against Bob Hope on America's The Mike Douglas Show, he has been in the public domain and it has not always been a comfortable relationship.

Still, we don't know what it is to be Tiger Woods. We will never even come close. We will never truly understand what it is to have all of that talent, and all of that money.

But none of us really had any idea until the past week that he could be just as human and twice as stupid as the rest of us.

There will perhaps be some on the PGA Tour who will privately celebrate Tiger's fall from grace. Given a moment to think about it, you might even come up with a couple of names.

They'll savour his discomfort and enjoy his absence before they wake up one day and realise a Tour without Tiger Woods isn't really a Tour at all.

For more than a decade, golf's popularity has echoed Tiger's popularity. His rise is their rise. I know people who wouldn't cross the street to throw rocks at Phil Mickelson's bag but they'd travel half the world to see Phil and Tiger going at it down the back nine on the final day of a major.

Does this scandal make Tiger a better person? Of course not. Does this make him a more interesting person? You bet. It may even, without the pressure of being golf's moral guardian to bear, make him a better player.

When he turned professional in 1996, Tiger revealed himself to the parts of the planet not already aware of his prodigious talent with, what else, a Nike television commercial.

"Hello World", he told us.

It has taken more than 13 years of professional over-achievement and a single personal humiliation, but I think we can finally say: "Welcome back."

eric.young@star-times.co.nz

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