Tiger with Tears

Tiger Woods won the Masters again. Watching it made me so happy that I actually teared up. How crazy is that?

Of course, I have never met Tiger Woods. His life and mine are as unattached as Donald Trump is to reality. Yet, with each of his shots, and I watched them all, I was as tensed up as if I was about to look at my blood test results. That’s fucking nuts.

So, why?

Now, I have other sports heroes and I pull ardently for. I’m a fervent Yankee fan. I idolized Mickey Mantle as a kid. I greatly admired Derek Jeter. Their at-bats meant more to me than the at-bats of anybody else. When tuning into the middle of games, I tried to calculate from the inning, the score and where the Yankees were in the batting order,  what Mantle or Jeter had done. There is no mathematical sense to that, but I convinced myself that it worked.

That idolatry had some basis. My ultimate idol is my father. He was a Yankee fan. The connection is obvious. 

When I was around 5 years old, the Yankees played most of their games during the day, the same time that  my father was at work. I had this idea that maybe my father was Mickey Mantle. Maybe he didn’t really go to his job. Maybe he secretly went to Yankee Stadium. After all, my father’s job was being an FBI Agent. Those guys had secrets that they couldn’t tell anybody. Maybe this was one of them.

So, the Yankee thing is understandable. But, Tiger?

There is, of course, the comeback part. It’s somehow rewarding to see the once on top fall and then bounce back again. Robert Downey, Jr? Martha Steward?

But, there’s something else about Tiger. I think it’s the civil rights part.

There is no sport more representative of white privilege than golf, and there is no place that more exemplifies that than Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters. Its members include, among others of similar status, the present or former CEO’s of Coors, Bank of America, IBM, American Express, and General Electric. 

The Club had no black or women members until recently. Then they really reached deeply into urban America to find  their first one – the President of Gannett Television. Then they killed two birds with one duck hook by letting in that scion of progressivism, Condoleeza Rice.

I can only imagine how thrilled they were when they were forced to let Tiger crash their white-tie party the first time. But, forced they were. Because of his unparalleled skill, they had no choice.   

And the golf fans, most of whom are  old enough to have lived through the sixties are not exactly former Black Panthers. But, they, too, have accepted Tiger not just into their world but on top of it.

Tiger, himself, is no civil rights activist. He plays golf with the Trumpster, the man whom a new book about the President’s golf game by Rick Reilly calls “The Cheater-in-Chief.” That’s not exactly something Malcolm X would do. But,,in his own way- quietly, without fanfare, without drum beating, on merit alone, Tiger Woods may have done as much for racial harmony as Malcolm X ever did. 

So, that’s what I think it was that teared me up on Masters Sunday. In the wake of Charlottesville and in the shadow of brown children being placed in cages, I was watching what was, in microcosm, a world I one day hope to see writ large. I was watching a black man be gloriously celebrated by the people who, as much as any other, are the white symbols of black repression. 

If that doesn’t make you happy, well, maybe some day it will.