The Cult of Tiger Falls Back to Earth

By KEVIN BLACKISTONE
As it turns out, Tiger Woods is not The Brother From Another Planet, to borrow liberally from the John Sayles' movie title, or even a Calabanasian, as Woods once famously labeled himself, from some other world.

In the wake of police reports that he crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant and tree in the wee hours of Friday on the edge of his manse's grounds in the ultra-exclusive gated community of Windermere, Fla., Woods proved he's just like the rest of us. He's human, or, more to the point, unable to avoid idiocy at all times.

Unfortunately, too many people were desirous (as Rush Limbaugh would say) to overlook Woods' realness. Why? Because it threatened to get in the way of what an outrageously good thing he was -- a clean-cut, quiet and well-spoken man of some color, or colors, who wore none of his mixed heritage or any hint of politics on his sleeve. He could provide something for everyone to feel good about, and was doing just that.

His sport latched on to him because he was the most exciting player it had witnessed in generations, if not ever, and one of the most compelling personalities in all sports. His parentage even gave the game something it desperately needed, a façade, at least, of being as inclusive as the rest of our sporting society. To be sure, Woods even attracted black fans to golf in numbers the game had never seen, even though Woods started out his career by cracking wise about black folks to Charlie Pierce in Esquire. (TMZ.com reported Saturday that a friend of Woods said Woods described his wife as having "gone ghetto" on him before the wreck.)As an English sociologist Ellis Cashmore wrote of Woods last summer in the journal Current Sociology: "Woods, or, more correctly, the media portrayal ... of Woods, is a discursive product for managing difference. By discursive product, I mean an article that is manufactured, refined in a way that conveys an argument or a persuasive type of reasoning. Woods' identity or character might have been formed by a particular period or context, but it is not Woods the person, but rather the descriptions, images and sounds of Woods, and how they are communicated that makes the product. These are practically independent of the flesh-and-blood man himself."



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