Perhaps the transformation from media villain to media victim persuaded Tiger Woods his luck has finally changed.
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Despite the avalanche of reviews of the sporting year, the passing of the greatest golfer ever to play the game has been largely overlooked. I refer, of course, to North Korean despot Kim Jong-il, whose death sparked hysterical scenes. Even Mother Nature joined in the mourning. A glacier near Kim’s birthplace cracked; in the city of Hamhung a Manchurian crane was observed circling a statue of the platform-shoe-wearing tyrant, before alighting on a branch where it remained, head bowed, for hours.
Perhaps the golfing world’s indifference was understandable: even though Kim was the greatest golfer ever to play the game, he played only once, and then just out of curiosity. He carded 38 under par with 11 holes in one.
He also outshot the national target-shooting team and would dash off an opera on a slow morning at one of his umpteen presidential palaces. The propaganda machine that peddled these Walter Mittyesque fantasies was less upfront about his reported status as Hennessy Cognac’s biggest private customer, quite a distinction for the leader of a famine-ravaged basket case.
The man many regard as the second-greatest golfer of all time showed signs of coming out of the downward spiral that had seen him plummet from first in the world rankings to 58th. In early December, Tiger Woods won the Chevron World Challenge, his first victory in 749 days and 26 tournaments.
Those who remain convinced – or perhaps hopeful – that Woods is a busted flush pointed out that the lucrative Chevron isn’t a PGA event, the field is restricted to 18 players (as opposed to 150-odd in most tournaments), and the Sherwood Country Club layout meant he hardly had to use his driver, these days a heart-in-mouth experience both for him and spectators wherever they happen to be.
But whereas Woods has struggled to play well two days in a row since his career and life imploded, this win followed a third-place finish in the Australian Open and a solid showing at the President’s Cup. Also, he appeared injury-free and in control of his emotions. And he played consistent percentage golf rather than the feverish mix of inspiration and ineptitude to which we’d become accustomed.
Coincidentally or not, Woods’s turnaround began amid the furore over the slur that was heard around the world: the “black arsehole” outburst by his former caddie, Kiwi Steve Williams, at a raucous private function in Shanghai. Perhaps his overnight transformation from media villain to media victim persuaded Woods his luck had finally changed for the better.
Nevertheless this episode did generate the worst sports writing of the year, a column by the UK Daily Telegraph’s Oliver Brown asserting that Woods let his ex-caddie off the hook – he told the media Williams certainly wasn’t a racist – because of his “curious resentment at being defined as black”.
Woods once told Oprah Winfrey that as a kid he coined the term “Cablinasian” – a combination of Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian – to capture his melting-pot background. Ignoring the possibilities that Woods is equally proud of all the strands in his make-up or simply a stickler for accuracy, Brown concluded this was “a defence mechanism against those who chose to perceive him purely in terms of his blackness”. Brown then ventured deeper into this murky swamp: the fact that Woods’s “multiple mistresses were overwhelmingly white fed an impression that he harboured a preference for Caucasian women. Within the black community this exerted an unsettling, alienating effect.”
There was no evidence for this inflammatory claim, or any apparent awareness that it evoked both black militant racial separatism and traditional redneck paranoia about black men and white women. This pen-picture of a self-loathing Uncle Tom was supporting evidence for Brown’s overarching charge: that by his unwillingness to condemn Williams, Woods “proved complicit” in preserving golf’s racist status quo. Someone so adept at portraying the victim as the guilty party has clearly missed his calling: that is a skill lawyers use when defending men accused of rape.