The extreme qualities and the obsessive pursuit of success that drive [the ascent of high achievers] can lead to their downfall. The discipline and pressure can lead to addictions, the opposite of control. Obviously we saw that in Woods; following his descent grew excruciating....Tiger was criticized for his transgressions (at least as much as SFH, as I remember it). But SFH never attempted a comeback. Maybe one reason Tiger could do it is that his sport was golf. You have more time to go through a long narrative of rise, fall, and comeback.
Entering rehab in 2010 after accusations of infidelity, sex addiction and substance abuse, [Woods] said: “I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.”...
Consider how swiftly the Olympic runner and nine-time N.C.A.A. champion Suzy Favor Hamilton was vilified after she was caught working as an escort while coping with mental illness....
[Serena] Williams has surpassed her male peers and demonstrated the flip side of the extreme, confident and righteous qualities necessary to achieve success — she dared to get angry, and show it, when she opposed what she considered an unfair call at the United States Open last September.... No women have the leeway to behave like Woods and get away with it; a black woman certainly does not.Tiger Woods is black... so the race theory here is weak. I think people — especially white people — love and root for Tiger Woods even more — a lot more — precisely because he is black.
Women literally cannot afford to make the messy mistakes we see in the long arc of a lot of a storied male athletes’ careers, and they rarely get the payoffs.Back to the gender argument. It seems to me, there's no one to compare to Tiger Woods — the ascent, the crash, the long time in the wilderness, the perfection of the big comeback win. You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't. Now, there's also the fact that people are much more interested in men's sports. But they're not so interested in golf. There are a lot of people who only care about golf to the extent that it's about Tiger. Who else has done that with a sport — made millions of people care about it only because of him (or her)?
“I’m no Tiger Woods,” Hamilton told me...Yeah, you and everybody else on the face of the earth except Tiger himself.
Society rarely allows women to nurture those bold qualities that drive standout success. Instead, to get ahead, women either learn to stifle those instincts, or get punished for them. This muffles the traits that might lead to failure and inevitably also the qualities that lead to success. To be sure, some men are being held accountable for their bad behavior these days....
Shouldn’t everyone be able to recover from a fall from grace? Or at the very least, shouldn’t we allow both men and women to get high enough to fall?Getting that high means beating everybody else. There's no way for the rest of us to "allow" that. Women already enjoy the allowance of playing in separated women's sports. Getting a comeback like Tiger Woods is something that's theoretically available for everyone, but who else could ever do it and who would even want that to happen to him (or her)? The argument for equality doesn't fly. We're talking about individual achievement here. You can dislike that adulation of the individual, but it's incoherent to demand equal access to it.
But it is true that we, the spectators, experience different emotions when we watch males and females. Is the author of the NYT piece trying to tell us we need to change our emotions and make them less about femaleness and maleness? Why should we do that? We're making a practice of watching different human beings as they perform physical feats. Why shouldn't our emotions have to do with gender? Why are we watching sports in the first place? I'd like to see a deeper analysis of the significance of sports spectating!
IN THE COMMENTS: RK wrote:
You don't get a comeback. You make a comeback. Maybe women are more inclined to wait for someone to give them something.Yes, this is what troubled me most about this NYT piece. It really does undercut women by insisting proactively that women be given something no man was given. That's what's incoherent. The idea of equality doesn't work, because what's demanded for women is not something any man ever had.
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216 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 216 of 216When I was 18, I ran a 100m dash in 10.5. I couldn't get a scholarship anywhere. That's still faster than the women's world record in the 100m. The world record holder for women would have a tough time beating a good high schooler, let alone an elite sprinter. Maybe that's why there's unequal interest in men and women's sports.
Men and women ARE different and men tend to be the superior athletes. Which is why men and women should have separate competitions and no trans allowed. On either team. Let the trans have their own league.
Yes, in the 100 m dash, the best female of all time, Florence Griffith Joyner's 10.49 s would only beat the best man more than 90 years ago, and she arguably was using performance enhancing drugs because her record might well stand for the next 50 years, or at least until the first trans-woman competes officially. Of course, that isn't surprising to me- power is going to be the primary determinant in events that last less than 3 minutes.
On the pole vault, I think that one is going to be hard to fully test over decades because of the changes in equipment over time. Even running has some of this as an issue- the shoes are certainly better today than they were even 30 years ago, as are the top level tracks. I just think the changes in the poles are bigger thing, though.
But I doubt the public would be quick to forget that a mother with young children had committed adultery and was drug or alcohol addicted while caring for young children
That depends completely on how good looking she is. But there are evolutionary reasons for men to worry about women stepping out on them. What profits it a man genetically to spend his life feeding and protecting another man’s progeny? It’s your way to the genetic dead pool. What profits it a man genetically to devote his life to a woman who won’t care for the most precious thing he has in terms of evolution?
Its all about game theory. The object of the game is to get your genes into succeeding generations. Game theory says that men are going to avoid sluts. Game theory says that women are going to step out from time to time when a better genetic offer presents itself and are going to be VERY good at hiding same. Sports are metaphors and practice for two activities that were very important in the evolution of mankind, hunting and combat. You can say that combat was not important, but once one band takes it up, it becomes critical to the survival of all of the other bands of humans.
Game theory suggests that men’s sports are a display behavior and women are going to be highly attracted to those who are successful at them. Game theory suggests that nobody is going to deeply care about women’s sports, except as a way to display female beauty. I give you figure skating and curling. Not sure why women’s gymnastics is so compelling, but those girls are pretty cute.
What about Martha Stewart? She made a hell of a comeback.
- Krumhorn
Anybody who doesn’t like the WNBA is clearly a misogynist. Anybody who does is a masochist.
Steven said...
The core problem with the article is the failure to notice the objective reality.
Tiger's comeback was not primarily a social phenomenon. It was winning his first golf major after ten years of not winning. If he'd lost the tournament, nobody would be talking about his comeback.
If Serena Williams went ten years not winning a tennis major, and then won one, I assure you everybody would talk about her comeback, too. If Annika Sörenstam came back and won an LPGA major now, thirteen years after her last, she might not make quite the headlines Tiger did (Tiger was a uniquely media-dominant player in his prime), but she'd get definite notice, too.
If anyone could do it, it would be Annika. I once created a storm of s*** on a message board by stating that Annika was the most dominant athlete in the world; it was right after she won nine tournaments in a row, something Tiger never did. Whoo boy, what a mess. I was attacked because (a) men were better and (b) golf is not a sport. I admit, I was half trolling; and, of course the women aren't as good as the men - biology. Annika did play in one men's PGA tournament; she just missed the cut and beat about one half of the men playing, i.e. she was better than about one half of the top 200 men golfers in the world (generally speaking).
Judi Inkster took ten or fiftenn years off from golf to raise her kids, came back, and won tournaments.
Williams has surpassed her male peers
A number of people have commented on the sheer nuttiness of this. There's no doubt that Serena Williams has been an excellent women's tennis player. But she's playing a different sport to the men and wouldn't make the top 200 in the men's game.
The great Jahangir Khan who did not lose a squash match for 5 years and 555 matches in the 1980s was as dominant in his sport as anyone has been at anything. But it would be deranged to say that he "surpassed" Borg or Federer or Rod Laver just because he happened to do his thing while waving a racquet.
Looks like Kate Smith's comeback is over.
"You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't."
BUT, identity politics doesn't do individualism. Therefore what makes Tiger Woods unique can not be relevant.
When the only tool in your toolbox is politics based on race/sex/class/gender, how could you do anything but generalize?
@Tank
Annika did play in one men's PGA tournament; she just missed the cut and beat about one half of the men playing, i.e. she was better than about one half of the top 200 men golfers in the world (generally speaking).
Yep. Which is much better than the Williams sisters managed in 1998, when they both lost overwhelmingly (6-1 and 6-2) to Karsten Braasch, the then-#203 male tennis player. Sörenstam was a phenom, and I wouldn't bet against her being able to make a comeback if she tried.
@Lee Moore
There's no doubt that Serena Williams has been an excellent women's tennis player. But she's playing a different sport to the men and wouldn't make the top 200 in the men's game.
After that match with Braasch, the Williams sisters revised their estimate of who they could beat in men's tennis to #350-and-lower, not that they then tested it. And while Serena is still good, she's not the athlete she was twenty years ago. I'd be surprised if she could make the top 500 in the men's game today.
"I think people — especially white people — love and root for Tiger Woods even more — a lot more — precisely because he is black."
That's true, though I don't think it's something white people should be patting themselves on the back about. And a lot of white people loved and rooted for Barack Obama precisely because he is black. It's an attitude which corrupts both black people and white people.
It may also be a matter that women have a limited window to have children. Making a comeback may require delaying or denying a family, and that's a lot to sacrifice.
Blogger Sebastian said...
By the way, question for sports fans: which female athlete came closest to matching the best man in her sport?
Sure, we'd have to debate how you'd measure the gap and how you'd standardize the measures across sports, but still: some female athlete had to be relatively the greatest, right? So, who?
Caitlyn Jenner?
Hamilton can't make a comeback now. She's too old to be a whore.
um, Serena, anyone?
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