THAT'S MEN:The Tiger Woods saga is a warning about the dangers of portraying yourself as squeaky clean, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
HERE IS MY favourite quote on the whole Tiger Woods business: “Tiger has done all men a favour. He has proved that there is no such thing as a perfect male, a perfect husband, a perfect father nor a perfect role model. He has got all us men off the hook.”
The quote – a comment on the Sky News website – provides a refreshing contrast to much of the prissy, hypocritical condemnation of Woods.
I am not here advocating serial adultery as a way of keeping oneself entertained but I don’t like the holier-than-thou brigade – I listened to enough of them when I was growing up in Holy Catholic Ireland and we all know how that played out.
Also, if 40 per cent of people – these are estimates I’ve come across from before Tiger crashed into the hydrant – have cheated at some time or other, then the world is hardly in a position to regard Tiger Woods as some sort of deviant. Admittedly, most cheats don’t bed enough members of the opposite sex to make up a Gaelic football team, but Tiger is, after all, a colossus on the world stage.
And don’t you have just a little sympathy for a guy whose mother-in-law and sister-in-law were visiting when the story of his adultery broke in the world’s press? Talk about no place to hide.
Many articles and blogs have been written on why Tiger cheated. Perhaps cheating was easier than facing up to relationship difficulties with his wife. I have read that cheats also are more extrovert than the partners on whom they are cheating. This theory would have it that they are going around bedding like-minded people.
Hmmmm. How come nobody mentions lust? It didn’t get to be one of the seven deadly sins for nothing yet psychologists seem remarkably reluctant to include lust as a motivator for adultery.
And what about availability? Say you’re a rich and famous guy and women are throwing themselves at you? Might that have anything to do with you winding up in bed with a selection of these women?
So, lust and availability – too simple? Did I miss a module in the Living on Earth course? Most of us don’t get to have sexually attractive persons who are not our spouses throwing themselves at us so perhaps that is why we prefer convoluted explanations that go beyond lust and availability.
I don’t deny that there are often more complex reasons than this behind cheating – all I’m saying is that there can be simple reasons behind it, too.
The Tiger Woods saga is also a warning on the dangers of portraying yourself as an altar boy. With the exception of objections to French men handling the ball in the penalty area, nobody particularly cares what footballers do with their leisure time.
And if you’re a rock star you’re expected to behave like, well, Tiger Woods. I suspect there are rock stars who cheat on their fans by being faithful to their wives but they manage to keep it quiet.
Tiger was built up as being an impossibly clean-cut boy. That squeaky clean image left him a long, long way to fall.
Presumably journalists knew what was going on and said nothing, and there is an argument to be made that saying nothing was the right thing to do because his behaviour off the course was none of our business.
Yes, yes, so true but the floodgates are open now and they’re not going to close again anytime soon.
Still, the drama may play out as these things usually do. We have had the fall from grace. We have had repentance. Next is forgiveness, then redemption.
This process cannot properly work itself out until women stop coming out of the woodwork and confessing their sins, but already I sense their revelations are losing their novelty value.
The final act in this drama is the book in which Tiger laces his confession with new, juicy revelations.
Then all he has to do, for the rest of his life, is to stop carrying on with incredibly attractive women who throw themselves at him.
No problem there, then.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living is published by Veritas