We can imagine Tiger Woods, like so many successful people,
getting less happy the more he achieved. Less freedom. Less and less
sleep, until it came only with medication. Even with a beautiful,
brilliant wife whom he loved, even with two children, whom he also
loved, even as the undisputed champion of his craft, he was
miserable, tortured by a spiritual malady and a crushing anxiety
from which there was no relief.
His mind was strong but his soul ached. It ached over his tragic
relationship with his father. It ached over the childhood he had lost.
It ached because it ached—Why am I not happy, he must have
thought, don’t I have everything I ever wanted?
It’s not simply that Tiger loved to win. It’s that for so long
winning was not nearly enough and never could be enough (the e-
word). He would tell Charlie Rose, “Winning was fun. Beating
someone’s even better.” Tiger said this after his public humiliation,
after his multiyear slump, after his stint in sex rehab. He still had not
learned. He still could not see what this attitude had cost him.
Everybody’s got a hungry heart—that’s true. But how we choose
to feed that heart matters. It’s what determines the kind of person we
end up being, what kind of trouble we’ll get into, and whether we’ll
ever be full, whether we’ll ever really be still.
When Tiger Woods’s father died in 2006, Tiger’s extramarital
affairs went into overdrive. He spent time in clubs, partying, instead
of at home with his family. His behavior on the course grew worse,
more standoffish, angrier. He also began to spend unusual amounts
of time with Navy SEALS, indulging in an impossible fantasy that he
might quit golf and join the Special Forces, despite being in his early
thirties (and one of the most famous people in the world). In one
weekend in 2007, Tiger Woods reportedly jumped out of a plane ten
times. In fact, the injuries that plague him to this day are likely a
result of that training, not golf—including an accident where his knee
was kicked out from under him in a military exercise “clearing” a
building.
There he was—rather than enjoying his wealth, success, and
family—cheating on his wife, playing a soldier in some sort of early
midlife crisis. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy
after all,” a friend of Earl and Tiger’s would say of the situation. Like
barry
(Barry)
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