Tiger, We Hardly Knew Ye, And Neither Did You

I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to write about the Tiger Woods debacle. But then it happened. I heard the mocking tones, the familiar guffaws and even the most liberal of commentators hopping on the schadenfreude express. So here I am riding to the rescue, because Tiger Woods has officially become a sad combination of both O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson.

That's right! He has passed into that media created netherworld of joke of the week after reigning for years as America's most acceptable Black man. What happened Tiger? Did they not need you anymore now that the President has that dubious distinction? Your career began with such promise, with you so eloquently disabusing white America of any notion that you were African-American, proving definitively that you were fully deserving of its love. You were not Black you were Cablinasian, a torturous invention born of such confusion and self loathing that it left the African-American community in a state of bewilderment.

Who among African-Americans, a Creole race by definition, is one hundred percent anything? I myself am part Irish and Cherokee and probably some other European and Native American tribes, but I don't butcher the language trying to describe or explain it -- trying to lessen the blow of my Blackness.

Since the sordid details of his one car accident and numerous extra martial hook-ups were revealed, everyone seems focused on the marriage and what was wrong with Tiger, but in keeping with the policy of this Blog to address the issue of gentrification in all its manifestations, let me set the record straight. Tiger's been messed up for years. He was the sheltered child prodigy for most of his life, rich before he knew who he was (outside of his particular talent for swinging a golf club) and was tricked into thinking that he was trans racial in the most racist society in the world. Result? He marries a nanny and dates cocktail waitresses on the side when he could have had so much more. (How many gorgeous, brilliant Black professional women are single today?)

How did this happen? My guess is that his lack of "game" (as evidenced by the tapes) was no liability with the classless neardowells he prefers. His money and fame were enough. Enough, it seems, to keep the much aggrieved golf club wielding nanny there too.

Despite this, a gentrified mind (Tiger's) is not the culprit; it is instead America's obsession with the age-old sin of miscegenation. Witness the tragedy of Steve McNair -- a man apparently murdered by a paramour and it was only a one-week story. The difference, his wife was Black and the murderous girlfriend, apparently one of many, was Persian. No white girls, no story.
Tiger Woods is guilty of the big one: Marrying a white woman and then cheating on her with white women. Not even white politicians get a pass on that one. A billion dollars or not, perfect swing or not and while interracial marriages have been condoned for elite Black men for a generation, cheating or being accused of anything untoward with a white woman has become a modern proxy for the age old lynchable offenses. (Lesson, you can borrow the china but don't break it.)

Today, of course, the lynching is by proxy and occurs on the 24-hour news cycle and the very public death occurs in the pocketbook. Tiger's been humiliated in the press, his ads have been pulled and he has decided to step away from golf indefinitely. His sentence has been rendered -- I hope he invested well. (For those who say he doesn't need to make another dime, I say, he has high overhead and downsizing doesn't seem to be in the cards right now)

Tiger, here's my suggestion, one golfer to another. Get a new caddy. Stop hanging with idiotic, waitress chasing bumpkins like Jordan and Barkley. Consult with Dave Chappelle, go to Africa and find more of the BL in your Cablinasian DNA. Stop living the life Madison Avenue wants you to live and find out, at long last, who you really are. Maybe, grow some facial hair, some locs and get some bass in your voice! You are in for a rough ride, the roughest of your life -- trust me -- you're going to want to be Black to get through this. We've been at this against all odds stuff for a while and like you, we're the best in the world.