"Why Don’t Women Get Comebacks Like Tiger Woods?"

Asks Lindsay Crouse in the NYT.

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....

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....

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.

[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.

Dr. Phil is disgusting. Is he trying to make it as obvious as possible?

Somebody should get help for him and make a show out of it.

ADDED: I think I've only watched Dr. Phil's show once. It was when Suzy Favor Hamilton was on. I didn't think much of what he was doing:

Phil never got around to asking SFH what treatment she's had or is having, and she looks so strange, that we had to wonder whether she's on any treatment at all. How could he not have asked? He's supposed to be Dr. Phil. Where's the doctor part? Isn't that atrocious set supposed to be kind of like a psychologist's office? And what's with the ominous music playing continually in the background? I had the feeling Dr. Phil was also purveying sex for daytime-TV-watching women who want porn with deniability.

Confession: I read the Suzy Favor Hamilton memoir.

A few days ago, I blogged about a couple interviews with Suzy Favor Hamilton — the Olympian who turned into a high-priced prostitute:

[The Wisconsin State Journal] begins the interview by observing that SFH's book could be the new "50 Shades of Grey" and later asks if people are saying "there is too much sex in the book."...

We watched her hour-long interview on Dr. Phil's show, which was quite bizarre... Phil never got around to asking SFH what treatment she's had or is having, and she looks so strange, that we had to wonder whether she's on any treatment at all... I had the feeling Dr. Phil was also purveying sex for daytime-TV-watching women who want porn with deniability.... Why is SFH, if she wants to come across as reformed and relatable, wearing her hair like that and why do her eyes glint so lasciviously every time she talks about sex?

The book is "Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness." So is it a "50 Shades of Grey"-type thing — titillating, or porn with deniability— or is it the saga of mental heath suffering and healing that the authors/publisher seems to want us to think it is? Well, it turns out it's neither! There are many descriptions of sexual encounters, but they are not written in an erotic style. The reader is not, I don't think, drawn in to feel the excitement of the sexual behavior itself, and you can't really identify with SFH. She's a very unusual person! She's someone who loved intense athletic competition and then felt completely dissatisfied living a normal life — in Madison, Wisconsin of all places — with a handsome, loving husband and a nice daughter. She repurposed her strongly physical, competitive spirit in the game of prostitution, in the place that — like the Olympics for an athlete — was the center of the world — Las Vegas.

From such a young age, I’d been told I was special, a prodigy, destined for greatness, and I had spent my whole life chasing that dream on the track. Now, in Vegas, I was looking to be number one, too. At first, it had been enough to have the men I slept with tell me how amazing I was. And then, when I’d needed to take it up a notch, having sex for money had been enough. Then my need to compete turned into wanting more and better gifts from my clients. Now, chasing the high, I became obsessed with the rankings that clients gave escorts on the go-to website for information about escorts all over the world, the Erotic Review. The rankings were the thrill for me, and they fed my insatiable desire to compete. Vegas was no different than the track. If I was going to compete, I had to win. 

Formulating a plan of attack to climb through the rankings, I thought of regulars I could surely receive 10s from, and prepared myself to go the extra mile for new clients who, in turn, I trusted would write me a positive review. I wouldn’t rest until I was number one in Vegas.

When I first heard that SFH was writing a book with a mental health angle, I wrote:

This is the standard approach famous people use to explain sexual misbehavior when they get caught. But here's a person who worked for an escort service that scheduled $600 an hour dates for her in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It's a business venture that seems organized and deliberate, not some sad symptom of mental illness. Too bad she can't own it.

Having read the book, I think she does own it! The mental health observations are dotted around in there, and there's an epilogue that tells us she's had a diagnosis and treatment, but it's a very short epilogue and what propels her into the health-care phase is not that she, on her own, decided the life she was living was bad or wrong or unsustainable. It's that she got outed. But I think the book makes it clear that she loved what she was doing, that she wasn't debasing herself or denying her humanity. She loved the sex, as she tells it. She wasn't just pretending. She massively enjoyed it, and it was a bonus that she also got paid a lot to do it.

"I was doing something I loved and getting paid for it."

"On several different occasions, I saw tourists just gushing over squirrels."

"They were taking selfies with the varmints in the background. Some had telephoto lenses and were shooting pictures like they’d stumbled on a bald eagle. I saw a whole family of Italians, three generations of them, gather around as they watched a squirrel eat a nut, or a pizza crust, or maybe it was a used condom. Who knows? Who cares? When did squirrels graduate to exciting wildlife? My dog would be appalled.... Which reminds me, last month, the Goldbergs were at the Copenhagen zoo. They had lions, some really cool vultures, and African wild dogs. They also had a big open-air exhibit of . . . raccoons. North American dumpster-diving raccoons. I thought it was hilarious."

From the depths a Jonah Goldberg column that I'm reading because there's material in it about Suzy Favor Hamilton, the topic of another post this morning. Go here for that. This post is about people who get excited about wildlife you think is utterly mundane and/or a nuisance.

Questioning Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton about her story that bipolarism led her into work as a high-priced Las Vegas prostitute.

 Wisconsin State Journal aims some skepticism at her: "Are people accepting that your bipolar led to this hypersexuality?" She answers:

SFH: That’s the hard part for people to understand. How can that be a mental illness? And if I explain it like that, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, but if I let people know that two months before that even happened, I was given the drug Zoloft and that brings on the hypersexuality, that particular anti-depressant. We all know that anti-depressants can do crazy things to people.

She doesn't absolve herself of responsibility:

SFH: No, I can’t say that the bipolar is to blame because I knew what I was doing. I can say that the Zoloft triggered the hypersexuality... I lost touch with reality in that I lost touch with being a mother, being a wife. None of that existed....

WSJ begins the interview by observing that SFH's book could be the new "50 Shades of Grey" and later asks if people are saying "there is too much sex in the book." That sounds skeptical of the mental-health angle, which, I'm sure, is useful in getting the author on daytime TV and giving cover to the kind of readers who don't like to think of themselves as consumers of porn. SFH says she was just trying "to show the destruction of the disease and the illness."

We watched her hour-long interview on Dr. Phil's show, which was quite bizarre. Here's a couple minutes of it, from the beginning:



Phil never got around to asking SFH what treatment she's had or is having, and she looks so strange, that we had to wonder whether she's on any treatment at all. How could he not have asked? He's supposed to be Dr. Phil. Where's the doctor part? Isn't that atrocious set supposed to be kind of like a psychologist's office? And what's with the ominous music playing continually in the background? I had the feeling Dr. Phil was also purveying sex for daytime-TV-watching women who want porn with deniability.

You can see even in that short clip that the interview was full of edits. Maybe they did ask her about her treatments and her progress and the answers weren't interesting or weren't believable. Stray extra questions: What's up with blurring the pages of Dr. Phil's folder of interview notes? Why is SFH, if she wants to come across as reformed and relatable, wearing her hair like that and why do her eyes glint so lasciviously every time she talks about sex?

ADDED: Here's the book, "Fast Girl," which seems to be doing quite well at Amazon. SFH has now moved from Madison, Wisconsin to L.A., and I'd be very surprised if this didn't end up as a movie. By the way, Meade and I met Suzy Favor Hamilton. Back before the scandal broke, we were walking around the Capitol Square at some festival or another, maybe "Cows on the Concourse," and she was involved in promoting a product — potatoes, I believe. We were just reading a poster, looking for bloggable things, and this man — a promoter of some kind (potato?) — insisted on introducing her to us. It was pretty awkward!

UPDATE: I've now read the book, and I opine on it here.

"Suzy [Favor Hamilton] had 'a very hard time turning 40.'"

"And for someone who used to draw all this attention,' and suddenly doesn’t get it as often, wouldn’t it be exciting, she says, to 'hear someone saying you are worth $600 per hour?'"

Elle Magazine quotes a friend of the disgraced Olympian in an overlong article summarized here.

($600 per hour sounded like a big compliment to SFH? Seems like the threshold for feeling like a compliment should have been more like $2,000.)

UPDATE: I've now read SFH's book, and I understand that the tips on top of the base rate did put it closer to $2,000. There were also expensive gifts and restaurant meals.

The Tuber and The Turpitude.

The Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers Association invokes the moral turpitude clause in its contract with Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton, recently outed as a prostitute.

Suzy Favor Hamilton — exposed as a call girl — had gotten in a couple other PR jams.

For one thing: "She became famous during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for intentionally falling to the track in the 1500 meter final when it became clear she could not medal in honor of her late brother, Dan."

And:

But I recall her... as the young woman in one of the most horrid and controversial commercials ever shown on U.S. television. The Nike spot, a dozen years ago, showed her being chased out of her house in the dark woods — stripped to her bra — by a maniac with a chain saw. Running through the woods, she finally outdistances him thanks to her Nikes. Protests centered on exploitation of violence against women (especially one half-naked) and it was soon pulled.

"So Meade, in your marriage, which one of you is the whore?"

A question asked in the webpages of Isthmus by Madison politico Stu Levitan.

Non-Madisonians may not know the name, but: "Stu Levitan has been a mainstay of Madison media and government for thirty-five years, a leader in both politics and the press since 1975. In addition to Books and Beats, Stu hosts Access: City Hall on the Madison City Channel and serves as chair of the Madison Community Development Authority and on the Madison Landmarks Commission. Since 1987, he has been a mediator/arbitrator for the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission."

Scroll up at the first link for the context, which is a discussion, initiated by Levitan, about the discovery that Madison sports heroine Suzy Favor Hamilton has been working as a call girl.

I feel bad about all the winners of the Big Ten's Suzy Favor Athlete of the Year Award.

If your name has been pasted on others as an honor, you have a special responsibility not to besmirch it. I feel sorry for the winners of that award, but otherwise, I wasn't in the mood to add to the exposure of "Three-time Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton [who] says she coped with depression and a troubled marriage by turning to a life of prostitution."

One of the country's best-ever middle-distance runners, Favor Hamilton competed for the U.S. at the Olympics in 1992, 1996 and 2000 but did not win a medal. She won seven U.S. national titles. She lives in Madison, Wis., where... she and her husband, Mark, live in a $600,000 home and appear to be in no financial distress....

Favor Hamilton told the website that only her husband was aware of her escort work, but that, "He tried, he tried to get me to stop. He wasn't supportive of this at all."

Favor Hamilton has been attempting to tweet her way back into respectability, working the mental health angle, saying she had "reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression" and that she was "drawn to escorting in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life."

This is the standard approach famous people use to explain sexual misbehavior when they get caught. But here's a person who worked for an escort service that scheduled $600 an hour dates for her in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It's a business venture that seems organized and deliberate, not some sad symptom of mental illness. Too bad she can't own it.