fire hydrant and the back windows smashed by a golf club.
Unconscious, his wife weeping over him, he was, for a moment, still,
in a way he had not been perhaps since he was a baby.
It did not last long.
The tabloid nightmare of all tabloid nightmares would ensue—
twenty-one consecutive covers of the New York Post. The text
messages. The affairs with porn stars and Perkins waitresses, frantic
sex in church parking lots, sex even with the twenty-one-year-old
daughters of family friends, all made public. The stint in sex rehab,
the loss of his sponsors, and the $100 million divorce—it all nearly
broke him, as it would break anyone.
He wouldn’t win another major for a decade.
“On the surface of the ocean there is stillness,” the monk Thich
Nhat Hanh has said of the human condition, “but underneath there
are currents.” So it was for Tiger Woods. This man who had become
an icon for his ability to be calm and focused in moments of intense
stress, a man with the physical discipline to pump the emergency
brake on his 129-mile-per-hour swing if he wanted to start over, the
champion of the “stillest” of sports, was at the mercy of insatiable
riptides that lurked beneath his placid demeanor. And as any
seasoned captain of the seas of life can tell you, what’s happening on
the surface of the water doesn’t matter—it’s what’s going on below
that will kill you.
Tiger Woods could stare down opponents and unimaginable
pressure, persevere through the countless obstacles in his career. He
just couldn’t do the same for his own spiritual demons.
The seeds of Tiger’s undoing were sown early. His father, Earl,
was a complicated man. Born into poverty, Earl Woods lived through
the worst of American racism and segregation. He managed to put
himself through college and join the army, where he became a Green
Beret in Vietnam. Beneath the surface of this accomplishment there
were also currents—of narcissism, egotism, dishonesty, and greed. A
simple example: Earl Woods returned from his second tour in
Vietnam with a new wife... a fact he neglected to mention to the
wife and three children he already had.
When Tiger was born of that second marriage, Earl Woods was
forty-three years old and not particularly excited to become a father
barry
(Barry)
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