Celebrity is a peculiar thing. It bestows a sort of mythic aura on its subject and engenders public reverence.
I’m thinking of Tiger Woods, lately in the news because, mostly, he’s a celebrity whose recent single-car accident landed him in the hospital with multiple injuries that have jeopardized his singular talent. Long ago, his ungodly and thoroughly chronicled skill at golf established him as a star. And, as Duke University anthropologist Orin Starn wrote in his 2011 book, “The Passion of Tiger Woods,” “ours is a starstruck culture.”
What’s interesting is how Woods’ celebrity took on the form of manifest destiny, claiming special virtues, as if he had some redemptive mission, an irresistible bent for grand accomplishments far beyond his craft.
Woods was only 21 in 1997 when Charlie Pierce’s lengthy Esquire profile revealed Woods’ sense of entitlement, a habit of telling dirty jokes and an apparent susceptibility to his father Earl’s belief, proclaimed to Sports Illustrated, that “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”
That was long before the series of scandalous reports that included a 2007 DUI arrest, 2009 SUV crash and marital infidelities, though Pierce was already—and reasonably—skeptical of the jock-to-savior leap. “This is what I believe about Tiger Woods,” he wrote, “…that he is the best golfer under the age of 30 there has ever been….He is going to be rich and famous and I believe he’s going to bring great joy to a huge number of people because of his enormous talent on the golf course…the most charismatic athlete alive today…”
But: “I do not believe that a higher power is working through Tiger Woods,” Pierce continued. “I don’t believe—right now, this day—that Tiger Woods will change humanity any more than Chuck Berry did.”
Pierce was following the perceptive old journalistic advice, dispensed by long-ago sports editor Stanley Woodward to celebrated columnist Red Smith, to “Stop godding up the players;” to recognize that the ability to reach astonishing athletic heights does not automatically translate to being a sainted person.
Still, Woods transmitted the strong pull of celebrity. Starn wrote that, while witnessing the 2004 U.S. Open tournament, “I was struck by the nervousness, even fear, among the spectators about coughing or moving during his swing and being singled out for his withering displeasure. Tiger was like Apollo, a glorious yet frightening god.”
In the spring of 2004, officials at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg sent out a “hear ye, hear ye, hear ye” press release announcing that Woods would join the camp’s professional soldiers for a week of bootcamp-type activity. Newsday assigned me to be there, and it turned out there was no real access to more than second-hand tales of Woods being outfitted in BDUs (the battle dress uniforms that most citizens call camouflage); of Woods’ participation in sun-up four-mile runs; of Woods firing a variety of weapons and taking two parachute jumps tethered to another jumper.
If the real soldiers were offended by Woods’ play-acting at being in the military, they did not say so. Because, one 20-year-old explained, “It’s like when Kid Rock came to Iraq while we were there and gave a concert. We know they’re there to keep the morale up.” Bob Hope entertaining the troops. A celebrity.
Rather than sharing a barracks with the enlisted men then, Woods was bivouacked in a VIP housing unit described by one G.I. as “like a bed and breakfast”—where such luminaries as vice president Dick Cheney and an Uzbekistan general stayed previously.
Some 3,000 spectators had been invited to the base for a brief trick-shot exhibition by Woods, to which he came riding up the 13th fairway of the base’s course, amid red smoke, in an awkward Michael Dukakis moment (ask your grandparents). His upper body was visible through the sunroof of an army-green Humvee as he perched behind a 50-caliber automatic machine gun. Wearing golf clothes and a smile.
Everyone was on Tiger Standard Time, just as they were the next time I—seldom dispatched to golf-related events—was sent to report on another Woods command performance. That was June of 2014. Woods was in Bethesda, Md., to play competitively for the first time since back surgery 3 ½ months before. He was 38 and had been stuck at 14 major titles for six years, but he remained, according to his fellow golfers, “the lifeline of our tour.”
He did not play well. “Rough” did not adequately describe the places he found his ball—among trees, clinging to a downhill slope above a small creek, on the wrong side of a cart path. He failed to make the cut for the final two days of the tournament—only the 10th time that had happened in 18 years on the tour, and the first time in 27 events.
Yet, while a mere handful of spectators watched the tournament’s leaders, crowds at least 40 times larger shadowed Woods around the course. On a mid-week workday. The extra attention to Woods wasn’t necessarily about the golf, but the golfer.
Celebrity is a magnetic thing. And it boosts a fan’s self-importance.