Living black icons are few and far between these days. There's me, obviously, Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Denzel Washington, Dr Cornel West, Chris Rock and Tiger Woods. It's not a definitive list by any means, but they're the only ones I can think of right now. For a hot minute, at the beginning of the millennium, it looked like Richard Blackwood would join our exclusive club, but the genius of Chris Morris' Brass Eye Paedogeddon Special put paid to that and perhaps we should be thankful.
So will my cohorts and I lose the company of Mr. Woods? That's the question. He gave a press conference on Friday to apologise for ever giving the impression that he was an asexual being with a smooth, rounded plastic groinal area resembling that of an Action Man. The first thing I noticed (apart from the fact that not even Gordon Brown crying about his dead daughter got this kind of media coverage. Our Prime Minister upstaged by a tumescent, throbbing Black penis? Awesome!) was that his head looked all weird and lumpen without his personally trademarked cap and as a consequence his face didn't make sense: he resembled a really bad hand in scrabble, all consonants and no vowels, with a 'Q' and a 'Z' thrown in just for a goof.
Turns out he hired George W. Bush's media advisers for this press conference and whilst it was scripted far more clumsily than Guy Ritchie's Revolver and delivered in a manner which would make even Jason Statham exclaim "That was shit. Can I do that scene again?", he offered what seems a genuine apology (see the hand on heart foto above). But then if I had billions of dollar$' worth of corporate sponsorship on the line I'd be apologising like a motherfucker too. I guess the only people who'll know if he meant any of it for sure are Tiger and his wife.
Golf was invented so that the rich could go for walks without bumping into peasants and the target demographic for any golfing TV broadcast remains middle-aged, middle-class men, popping Viagra like smarties who are trying to decide whether to upgrade to a Chrysler 300 or a Mercedes Benz at Easter. Their wives pretend, hypocritically, to be shocked at Tiger's antics, whilst kicking themselves that they could have actually met him a couple of years ago if they'd gone to that corporate hospitality thingy he hosted during the local golf tournament. Most men will pretend to be appalled at what Tiger's done whilst hissing "Go on, my Son!" under their breath - everyone with a pulse recognises that if you can't start a conversation with "'S'up, sweet thing? I'm Tiger... Fancy a bit?", then what's the point of being a billionaire? - whilst 'Golf Widows' the world over now fantasise more about sex with the Tiger than with their husbands. Fact!
It was amusing to watch the corporations run away from him like Cheryl Cole fleeing a Relate Counselling session; Accenture dropped him; AT&T barred his calls; and Gillette advised that they would be scouring the planet looking for literally anyone else to shave for them - I personally turned them down last Wednesday, so expect your call any minute.
Ever searching for the world between the cracks in the pavement I figured I'd slide by Tiger's website and see if there was an official story.
web.tigerwoods.com ROCKS at the moment. It's choc-full of innuendo and reads like a first draft of 'Carry On Golfing'. In the section entitled 'Tiger's Tips' (fnar, fnar), where the man himself offers advice allowing us to emulate a Golf Master and improve our 'game', we find:
'Holding firm greens' (!)
and
'Face up in the rough' (as opposed to 'Face down in the rough', presumably)
His monthly blog includes:
'Playing three in a row' (lucky bastard!)
and
'Developing endurance and stamina' (riiiight...)
All of which, I would suggest, got him into trouble in the first damned place.
Anyway, he's going back to rehab for a while and it made me wonder: what exactly do they do in there?
My first port of call was the Sexual Recovery Institute who claim to treat;
- Sexual Addiction
- Compulsive Masturbation
- Online Hookups
- Porn addiction
- Chronic Infidelity
- Prostitutes & Massage
- Exhibitionism
- Voyeurism
- Strip Clubs
Not that I suffer from 'Strip Clubs' or 'Prostitutes & Massage' personally, but they sound pretty serious, don't they?
The Mayo Clinic identifies the symptoms of sex addiction as follows;
- Having sex with anonymous partners or prostitutes
- Using commercial sexually explicit phone and Internet services
- Engaging in excessive masturbation
- Frequently using pornographic materials
- Engaging in masochistic or sadistic sex
- Having a fixation on an unattainable sex partner
But, strangely, when you visit their site you get pop-ups advertising what can only be described as special interest Adult DVD titles such as;
'Tiitten Party: Big Bouncing Euro Tits' and 'Rock That Midget 2' (to be honest, a quick scan of the second one reveals that it has very little to do with music). Evidently some kind of cruel test to make you think "Please, God, it's happening again! I'm being assaulted by porn!!!" and immediately sign up for a course of treatment.
As the prescient Chris Rock observed "Men are only as faithful as their options," so someone like Tiger, logically, will be more predisposed to extrajudicial coitus. Ditto Ashley Cole, Vernon Kay, John Terry etc etc... Thus, his only crime seems to have been getting caught. If he had balls as big as Our Tone's then, once fingered, he would have denied it and then bounced up and down like a toddler at a Tweenies concert shrieking that if he had to do it all again, he would ('my friend, Fernando').
Besides, Tiger's real crime, which will never ever get mentioned, but for which he should definitely say 'sorry', is documented in the film 'The Golf War'. In the late nineties the government of The Phillipines, its military and a cabal of greedy land developers, attempted to displace thousands of villagers and farmers from their homeland to build a golf course. Opponents to this gleaming 'economic development' were killed, whilst Mr Woods was hired by the government to play in an exhibition match and promote the game of golf. The government called it "The Day of the Tiger" and at his junior golf clinic Tiger uttered these portentous words;
"I want all of you to learn and grow from this experience. Invariably you're gonna learn life, gonna learn about life because golf is a microcosm of life."
Romy Capulong, legal representative for the farmers, assumed a diametrically opposed position: "Tiger Woods should be barred from entering this country, I think. If I can do something about it - I'll certainly do that - to bar him from entering this country and propagating golf."
Kinda puts banging a few porn stars into perspective, n'est ce pas?
Denzel Washington revelled in his Oscar winning role as the amoral Police Officer on a powertripping bender in 'Training Day', but felt the character was so depraved and corrupt that the only just retribution was death in a hail of bullets. As the perpetual, so-called 'War On Terror' unravelled this seemed completely out of step with reality, so much so that if you watch the movie now you feel let down by a lazy, disingenuous cop-out (sorry) of an ending which sits uneasily with the easy nihilism of the film.
Evil always prospers.
Politicians never apologise.
However, wouldn't it be great if just once. Once! A world leader, any world leader, proffered a Tiger style 'mea culpa' and then went into Conflict Rehab to cure his War Addiction?
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