A Tiger in retreat

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE

US Weekly posted on the Web a frantic voice message by Tiger Woods that is pretty much impossible not to mock. Getty Images

Two very different thoughts crossed my mind when I heard the cringe-worthy Tiger Woods voice message left on the phone of a woman named Jaimee Grubbs. For those of you who have not heard the message, here it is in verse:

A Tiger In Retreat
By Tiger Woods

Hey
It's uh
It's Tiger
I need you to do me a huge favor.
Um.
Can you
please
uh
take your name off
your phone my wife went through
my phone
and
may be
calling you.
So if you can
please
take your name off that.
And um.
What do you call it?
Just have it
as a number on the voice mail.
Just have it as your telephone number.
OK?
You got to do this for me.
Huge.
Quickly.
All right.
Bye.

Right, I should not be poking fun at another man's panic, especially a man whose golfing talents I have so appreciated and enjoyed. But frankly that gets at my first thought about the voice mail which was: This message is so ludicrous that it is impossible not to mock it. I mean, let's forget about the sadness of Tiger Woods being reduced to this sort of infidelity clumsiness and let's forget about the cosmic hopelessness of counting on a woman who had been on VH1's Tool Academy* to keep this message secret from the world. My real question is this: Did Tiger Woods -- even if he was panicked and not thinking straight -- really think that if this woman changed her VOICE MAIL MESSAGE that he would have a chance to get away with whatever he was hoping to get away with? This is Tiger Woods, for crying out loud, the golfer who can play his way out of any trouble, the businessman who made himself into a virtual billionaire and one of the world's most famous people, the public figure who has kept the world's media locked outside for more than a decade. And this was his grand plan? Get the woman to change her phone message? What then? Tie some shoelaces together? Put the thermometer up to the lamp so that it looked like he had a fever?

*What the hell is VH1's Tool Academy? I keep hearing it repeated again and again that Jaimee Grubbs was on VH1's Tool Academy, but I literally have no idea what it is. Fine, nobody wants to tell me, I'm going to look it up right now ... OK, apparently it's a show where "bad" boyfriends who are "tools" -- thus the name -- are sent by their girlfriends to some sort of charm school run by Trina Dolenz, whose claim to fame (and such words have rarely been used so lightly) was that she was married to Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees for 15 years. If this sounds to you like the sort of reality show they would have as a joke on The Simpsons, yeah, that thought crossed my mind, too. Only I'm not sure even the writers of The Simpsons would come up with a show about bad boyfriends being made good by the ex-wife of the drummer from the Monkees.

Jaimee, according to the show's Web site, was tired of being treated like arm candy by her boyfriend "Shawn," who is -- I swear I am not making ANY of this up -- an underwear designer. Tiger can pick 'em.

I don't know of any way -- I simply do not see any possible way -- that you can NOT make fun of Tiger for this.

But here was my second thought, and I'll admit right off that I'm probably WAY off base here. Nobody I know seems to agree with me, and they are probably right. But I'm going to say it anyway: Look, in general, people seem to be all over the map on the Tiger thing. Some are saying that this absurd scandal may scar Tiger Woods and others say that it will soon blow over. Some say that it may irrevocably alter his public image, while others say that it won't do that at all -- people are forgiving, look at Kobe! Some say that it is disgusting the way the media digs into Tiger's private life (it's nobody's business), while others want more and are busy predicting divorce and rather gleefully quoting a $300 million prenuptial agreement. It's hell to be in the public eye.