Tiger Woods\u2019 slide from grace was lubricated by hypocrisy.\u00a0\u00a0 Right after he turned professional, Woods spent some time with a canny reporter in New York, and the resulting portrait of a wise-cracking, flirty and slightly scatological young man terrified Tiger\u2019s handlers, who then lowered an iron curtain secure enough to have made the Kremlin proud.\u00a0 No outsider would ever again be allowed into Tiger\u2019s private lair.\u00a0 When he got married in Barbados, the wedding planners hired every helicopter in the Caribbean to keep the paparazzi away.\u00a0 A shipyard in Washington state had the audacity to tell potential clients that it had built Tiger\u2019s yacht until it was ordered by his lawyers to zip it. In place of the fun-loving young man readers of that early profile glimpsed, Team Tiger manufactured a superhero.\u00a0 He bullied the media and intimidated his fellow competitors.\u00a0 He was bullet-proof.<\/p>\n
He started the Tiger Woods Foundation to help \u201cyoung people reach their goals.\u201d\u00a0 He would, in defiance of the philosopher Charles Barkley\u2019s warning, hold himself out as a role-model.\u00a0 On the Foundation\u2019s website, Tiger wrote that he \u201cworked hard and applied my family\u2019s values to everything I did.\u00a0 Integrity, honesty, discipline, responsibility, and fun: I learned these values at home and in school, each one pushing me further toward my dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
We know now, of course, that Woods\u2019 private life more closely resembled the fantasies of Austin Powers than the contented domesticity of Father Knows Best.\u00a0 According to the Tiger Woods Foundation\u2019s website, it has \u201d dispersed more than $30 million toward communities nationwide through grants, scholarships and the Tiger Woods Learning Center.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tiger has been earning more than $100 million per year.\u00a0 \u201cOn average,\u201d according to an article in American Demographics<\/em>, \u201cpeople whose household income is $100,000 or more donate about $4,000 a year to philanthropic causes, compared with about $600 per household for those earning less than $25,000; the national average is $1,600. People making $100,000 or more shell out an average of 2.7 percent of earnings.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So there\u2019s nothing extraordinary about Tiger\u2019s philanthropy.\u00a0 Given his wealth and the benefits the foundation has provided to his image, it\u2019s not unfair to conclude that he\u2019s parsimonious.\u00a0 He raises the money from sponsors rather than writing checks himself.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The final casualty of Tiger\u2019s disgrace is the notion that players who adhere to golf\u2019s traditions of honesty and fair-play, which are real and verifiable, manifest these qualities in everything they do.\u00a0 That\u2019s a dangerous myth, and Tiger is paying a high price for trying to convince us of its truth.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0There\u2019s a fearful symmetry between Tiger\u2019s prodigious ascent and his precipitous fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"