Tiger Woods’ friendship with Michael Jordan one of many curious aspects of golfing great

If you ever have a spare couple of hours, may I recommend a hilarious novella called The Underminer: Or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. A masterclass in passive aggression, it is told in the form of a series of monologues from one “friend” to another over a number of years. Many will recognise the archetype of the chum who brutally diminishes you, despite only appearing to offer sympathetic support.

Might Michael Jordan be Tiger Woods's undermining friend? Let's have a look at an interview the NBA legend has given, which featured in the epic and deeply gripping long read about Woods which ESPN published last week, written by Wright Thompson. "The thing is," Jordan declared solicitously of his buddy, "I love him so much that I can't tell him: 'You're not going to be great again.'"

Fortunately, telling ESPN in a major landmark feature on Woods is the equivalent of writing it in a secret diary. Even so, I can’t help feeling that with friends like Michael, Tiger is all set for detractors.

“What does he do all day?” wonders Jordan, rather unwonderingly. “I don’t know. I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t know.” Of Woods’s failed marriage, he observes: “It’s a ship he can’t right and he’s never going to.” Alrighty. Might he not find someone else? “I don’t know if he can find that type of happiness.” Oof. There is, of course, a fine line between tough love and toxic buddydom – even if it feels like we crossed it a couple of fairways back.

In fact, some have long theorised that the moment Woods struck up a friendship with Jordan was a significant one in his downfall. Wright Thompson’s piece puts new flesh on the anatomy of a friendship, claiming that right back when he shot to fame, Woods approached Jordan (and Derek Jeter) in a New York club with that age-old inquiry: “What do you do to talk to girls?” Something of a seasoned pro on this front, Jordan was baffled he had to ask. “Go tell ’em you’re Tiger Woods” came the reply.’

Soon they were friends. In many ways Jordan was the perfect buddy for perhaps the greatest ever golfer, who could hardly have found a soulmate among his fellow US PGA players, even if they hadn’t been tedious evangelical shitehawks, almost to a man. World No1s don’t have a huge peer group from which to draw, and – albeit not contemporaneously – Jordan fitted that bill.

There was a time when Michael Jordan was the NBA, just as Tiger Woods was golf, and the former's creation of an apparently consequence-free environment for himself may well have rubbed off on the latter. Perhaps they also bonded over their decidedly apolitical passage through sporting megastardom. Certainly the failure of both men to become standard bearers for black causes disappointed many in the movement. When Jordan declined to endorse the progressive black Democrat Harvey Gantt over the racist Jesse Helms in a North Carolina Senate race, he observed deathlessly that "Republicans buy shoes too".

The selling of shoes at any cost may then have been another source of common ground, conscious or otherwise, between Woods and Jordan.

What was the most Tiger Woods thing ever to happen off the course? Second place definitely goes to that preposterous, presidential-style press conference, at which he apologised to the world and his sponsors for infidelity while his mother sat purse-lipped in the front row. But the top spot will forever be taken by the Nike advert he put out on the occasion of his unmasking as a cocktail waitress addict, in which the disembodied voice of his own dead father was co-opted in the cause of selling shoes.

“Did you learn anything?” intoned Earl Woods, over footage of Tiger staring silently at the camera. If Tiger did it certainly wouldn’t have been a lesson the serial womaniser Earl had ever taken. Among the more intriguing details in the very crowded field of ESPN’s feature is the revelation that Tiger buried Earl in an unmarked grave.

Quite what succour Woods’s friend Jordan is providing him now, many months into his non-recovery from back surgery, is unclear. But a few years out from the sound and fury of his tabloid implosion, the Woods narrative feels like one of those classic American downfall stories of the last century, which find their fictional analogues in movies such as Citizen Kane and There Will Be Blood. They typically end up with the once all-powerful protagonist in seclusion, as marooned among the trappings of his wealth as he is profoundly unsatisfied.

Truth offers just as much as fiction to the armchair psychologist, as ESPN’s mind-boggling stuff about Tiger’s intervention-level obsession with military training indicates. (Earl was a Green Beret.) No one in real life would give their estate such a literary signpost of a name as Xanadu, you might think – except that Tiger Woods called his yacht Privacy. He has checked into hotels under Wolverine’s alias Logan Howlett, though the latter’s primary mutant power of accelerated healing can only be said to have eluded him.

The notes to his unfinished work The Last Tycoon contain F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous observation that “there are no second acts in American lives”, and it is difficult not to see Woods’s trajectory in these terms. Having never liked him at his peak, these days I confess to feeling there is such a tragic grandeur to his story that I devour any and all news related to it. This week, the hopeless fairytale believer in me leapt at news that Woods has registered for June’s US Open. And if he somehow manages to get fit in time, I’m sure Michael Jordan will be there, cheering him all the way.

(Guardian service)