"Trump is 47 and Woods is 49, making this a surprisingly age-appropriate celebrity pairing."

I'm reading "Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump: MAGA Dating Drama, Explained" (Intelligencer).

I wonder what else they're not doing wrong.

"What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial."

A good title. It's something I was trying to parse on my own yesterday.

The article is at The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow. Subheadline: "The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case." The subheadline in my head was: Big man brought down by sex. Or should it be: Pile everything together and the monster will be visible?

Consider this: Farrow's book about Weinstein was called "Catch and Kill" (commission earned), and in Trump's trial, David Pecker has been testifying about the National Enquirer’s "catch and kill" scheme. 

From a CBS News story about Trump's lawyer's cross-examination of Pecker:

Pecker said he first gave Trump a heads up about a story in 1998.... [Trump's lawyer Emil] Bove had Pecker walk through negative stories that he had killed about other figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.

"The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced. The road to success is always under construction."

Said representatives of Beyoncé, quoted in "Beyoncé to cut ableist slur from Renaissance song/Charities question why lyric was released weeks after similar controversy" (London Times).

The objected to line — on "Heated" — is "Spazzing on that ass, spaz on that ass." 

Who wrote that line? "The song has nine credited writers including Beyoncé and Drake, the Canadian rapper, but it is not clear which of them wrote the lyrics."

What was the "similar controversy" that happened recently? Lizzo used the same word, in the line "Hold my bag, bitch, hold my bag/ Do you see this shit? I’m a spaz."

"Some years ago I evolved what I called the Small Ball Theory to assess the quality of literature about sports."

"This stated that there seems to be a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it utilizes -- that the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls...."

Wrote George Plimpton — in 1992 — in "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature" (NYT). I'm reading that not because this weekend is The Masters, but because I stumbled across a 1996 piece "Bad Sports," by Michiko Kakutani (NYT), about the "hippie psychobabble" that had taken over golf writing:

Consider the ur-text of New Age golf writing, ''Golf in the Kingdom'' (1972), by Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen. In the course of the book, the reader is introduced to a guru-like golf teacher named Shivas Irons, who spouts aphorisms like ''let the nothingness into yer shots,'' and is pelted with a boggling array of metaphors: golf as ''the new yoga of the supermind,'' golf as a recapitulation of evolution and golf as a Rorschach test of character....

Two recent novels -- ''The Legend of Bagger Vance,'' by Steven Pressfield, and ''Follow the Wind,'' by Bo Links -- give us Shivas wannabes, who tell their disciples to find their ''troo self.''... Perhaps sappiest of all is Jeff Wallach's ''Beyond the Fairway,'' a series of essays that purports to be a golf version of ''Zen in the Art of Archery'' when in fact it's closer to one of those business manuals that try to adapt the principles of Sun Tzu's classic ''Art of War'' to corporate back-stabbing....

I'm reading Kakutani's old essay because I was looking up "The Art of War" in the NYT. And I wasn't doing that out of any sort of thought that the Russians are botching the art of war in Ukraine, but because I wanted to do a post in honor of the 50th anniversary (tomorrow) of the discovery of the Yinqueshan Han Tombs, which contained "a nearly complete Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) copy of The Art of War, known as the Yinqueshan Han Slips, which is almost completely identical to modern editions." 

Back to Kakutani (whose name is misspelled in the NYT scan of her ancient article):

Zen golf, [Wallach] writes, is ''a way of transporting yourself to a new dimension, gaining access to new perspectives, and maybe racking up a few birdies along the way.'' The problem with such passages isn't just the bad writing (which pretty much negates George Plimpton's famous ''Small Ball Theory'' that the smaller the ball the better the writing), the sanctimoniousness or even its startling trivialization of Zen. The problem is that such writing takes sport out of the lovely pure realm of the physical, where talent and strength and discipline are measured in unforgiving inches and lifetime stats, and plunges it into the warm recovery movement realm of subjectivity and self-esteem.

Little did Kakutani know, the very year she wrote, 1996, a new phenomenon would take over golf. Tiger Woods went professional that year, and just about ever since, the main thing about golf has been how is Tiger doing? An in-the-flesh icon overwhelmed the old hippie psychobabble of "The Legend of Bagger Vance." 

But they did make a movie out of "The Legend of Bagger Vance" — "Time [Magazine] called it one of the most 'embarrassing' films of recent years for its treatment of African Americans and the use of a 'Magical African-American Friend.'" 

Matt Damon's magical friend was, of course, Will Smith: 

"Biles need only watch the documentary The Last Dance, which features [Michael] Jordan alone in a mansion drinking enormous glasses of alcohol and hating everybody..."

"... to understand that there is a cost to valorizing competition to the exclusion of everything else. [Tiger] Woods’s career self-imploded in a way that seemed like a direct response to the punishing mentality required to dominate every tournament — which didn’t stop the emergence of the narrative that he had to start winning again in order to redeem himself. There are surely superathletes who avoid becoming alienated head cases (Roger Federer seems like a pretty well-balanced individual). But clearly, there is a severe mental toll, oddly underexamined in our sports-obsessed culture, that comes from a life of perpetually breaking the very limits of what it means to be human, with a human’s emotions and vulnerabilities."

From "The One Limit Simone Biles Wouldn’t Break" by Ryu Spaeth (NY Magazine). 

"As far as JD taking a cart — well, I walked with a broken leg. So…"

“I walked with a broken leg.”

Friendly reminder @TigerWoods is as tough as they come. #PGAChamp pic.twitter.com/01wyfhQWEa

— PGA of America (@PGA) May 14, 2019

Background here (a the NY Post). The PGA granted John Daly a waver under the Americans with Disabilities Act for this week’s PGA Championship at Bethpage Black. Daly, who has a bad knee, qualifies to play because he won this particular tournament back in 1991. Tiger Woods played with a stress fracture once (back in 2008 when he won the U.S. Open).

I'm giving this my "insults" tag even though the insult is delivered only subtly and indirectly. That's a masterly insult.

"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.

"Love people who are great under pressure. What a fantastic life comeback for a really great guy!"

Maybe it's a symptom of Trump derangement, but I can't help hearing him talking about himself:

Love people who are great under pressure. What a fantastic life comeback for a really great guy! https://t.co/41MtJtYEjq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2019

"Tesla’s Elon Musk, definitely a visionary brain genius and not at all a manic idiot spaz and brazen fraud, has invented the future of mass transit for which we so desperately clamored."

"A narrow, jagged death-tunnel through which, uh, one Tesla-brand car at a time can, ah, drive ... the person who owns it, plus maybe two or three other people ... from one place to another ... at 49 miles per hour."

Mocks Albert Burneko at Deadspin.

Didn't we all agree back in 2006 that the word "spaz" isn't acceptable? That was when Tiger Woods called himself "a spaz," and the British press reacted very negatively. Here's what Language Log wrote at the time:

So how did the word spaz become innocuous playground slang in the U.S. but a grave insult in the U.K.? There's no question that spaz is a shortened and altered form of spastic, a term historically used to describe people with spastic paralysis, a condition... now commonly known as cerebral palsy.......

Here is the earliest cite [for the derogatory use] in the OED, from film critic Pauline Kael in 1965, along with another cite I found from that year in a New York Times column by Russell Baker:

1965 P. KAEL I lost it at Movies III. 259The term that American teen-agers now use as the opposite of 'tough' is 'spaz'. A spaz is a person who is courteous to teachers, plans for a career..and believes in official values. A spaz is something like what adults still call a square.

"Observer: America's New Class System," New York Times, Apr. 11, 1965, p. E14 Your teen-age daughter asks what you think of her "shades," which you are canny enough to know are her sunglasses, and you say, "Cool," and she says, "Oh, Dad, what a spaz!" (Translation: "You're strictly from 23-skidoo.")

So by the time Kael and Baker noticed teenagers using spaz, the sense had already shifted to 'uncool person,' without reference to lack of motor coordination.... [T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with... Steve Martin... playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz"...

For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s... the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....

And then in 2014, Weird Al Yankovic had to apologize for this song lyric:

Saw your blog post
It's really fantastic
That was sarcastic
'Cause you write like a spastic

Anyway, I wouldn't use "spaz." It makes an insult out of comparing somebody to a disabled person. You shouldn't want to cause that collateral damage.

That said, Musk's Tesla tunnel is absurd.

"For perspective, let’s flip the script. Would you believe that answer if it came from Tiger Woods?"

"Mickelson insisted he had not acted in haste or irritation. Instead, he said, he knew that the penalty for striking a moving ball was two strokes, and he had quickly determined that was a better result than letting his wayward putt roll off the green into worse shape. (There is a separate rule for stopping or deflecting a moving ball that could have led to a disqualification, but officials determined that Mickelson had violated the rule for striking a moving ball, not the one for stopping or deflecting one.) 'I’ve thought about doing the same thing many times in my career,' Mickelson said about striking rather than stopping his moving ball. 'I just did it this time. It was something I did to take advantage of the rules as best I can.'"

From "What Was Phil Mickelson Thinking?" by Bill Pennington (NYT) about this bizarre golfing:



Quite aside from what you think about that bizarre golfing, what do you think of the "perspective" supposedly to be gained by asking what we'd think if it was Tiger Woods? Is that supposed to be some sort of racial analysis, like that if you believe Phil Mickelson, you're a carrier of the infection of white privilege?

This is the third NYT article I'm blogging this morning, and the first 2 are about race. Maybe my thinking is skewed to see race everywhere — because, you know, it's deeply complex, historically layered, powerful, and submerged.

I'm averting my eyes from the mugshot.

I feel some respect for the man's privacy, and it's painful to see him exposed and brought low like that, a human icon of our time.

"President Donald Trump is said to be a gracious host at his golf courses. He high-fives his playing partners after a good shot..."

"... and keeps his cool when his own game goes awry, according to friends, never cursing or throwing his clubs. But he is also known to run afoul of the game’s play-it-as-it-lies rules. And his trash-talking habit is well-documented by his long-time golfing partners, sportswriters and even links legends like Tiger Woods."

So begins a Politico article, "Trump gets ready for some golf course diplomacy with Japan's Abe." I was surprised at how respectful to Trump Politico was willing to be, but it does get its digs in:

“He’s absolutely unscrupulous, absolutely completely bankrupt of any morality, when it comes to golf,” said Rick Reilly, a longtime sportswriter who joined Trump on the course for a 2004 book about caddying for celebrities. “I don’t know how the Japanese are going to like that.”...

“It’s like he bullies the ball,” added John Paul Newport, a former Wall Street Journal golf reporter who wrote a column about losing a one-on-one match to Trump in 2010....

In 2012, rock star Alice Cooper told Q Magazine: “The worst celebrity golf cheat? I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played with Donald Trump once. That’s all I’m going to say.”

And here's what Tiger Woods wrote last December:

I recently played with President-elect Donald Trump. What most impressed me was how far he hits the ball at 70 years old. He takes a pretty good lash.

Our discussion topics were wide-ranging; it was fun. We both enjoyed the bantering, bickering and needling. I also shared my vision for golf and what I'm trying to do.

We didn't have a match and played for fun. I was testing drivers and fairway woods, and changed some settings. I think he enjoyed seeing the difference in shots when you experiment.

"The hardest part for me is there's really nothing I can look forward to, nothing I can build toward."

"So where is the light at the end of the tunnel? I don't know, so that's been hard... I think I've achieved a lot, and if that's all it entails, then I've had a pretty good run. But I'm hoping that's not it. I'm hoping that I can get back out here and compete against these guys. I really do miss it.... If I can get to that, then we can start talking about golf.... But let me get to where I can pass the time and really be a part of my kids' life in the way that I want to be part of it physically, not just as a cheerleader."

Said Tiger Woods, who spends most of his time playing video games.

"Most men would drink over such losses.Tiger has sex over it. Usually with local hookers whom he pays exorbitant amounts to...."

"He withdrew from Farmers. You have to understand, while it's not right, it's not really wrong either. Tiger isn't married. He doesn't really drink or do drugs. So what else does he have when he can't afford to lose again? He is allowed to find some relief."

Farmers = the Farmers Insurance Open, a golf tournament from which Tiger Woods withdrew because of injury.

"When Tiger realized he was seen, he became concerned and eventually he decided to confess to Lindsey. Something he didn't do with Elin. He came clean and I give him credit for that. Yes, Tiger cheated again. But it wasn't with anyone special. He really wanted Lindsey to be the one. But he blew it again. He can't help himself. He's got an addiction. He relapsed."

Lindsey = Lindsey Vonn, the beautiful Olympic skier, with whom he had a 3-year relationship.

I hadn't seen sex addiction referred to in a long time. I thought that had gone away. Thought it was roundly recognized as bullshit.... and I mean to the point where people weren't going to say it anymore. Expired bullshit. I know people will still bullshit, but you have to use things that will work as bullshit. Interestingly, I think the process of rejection of the idea of sex addiction was triggered by the Elin-and-Tiger breakup.

Speaking of things you don't see much anymore...

... and it's really hard to notice an absence, by the way, so it's important when anything like this turns up (and the observation is vulnerable if in fact you can point to the supposedly absent thing anywhere) — but here are 2 things that I've noticed have gone missing. One was emergent and got nipped in the bud. The other was rampant and now rare.

Emergent but nipped in the bud: "Microaggression." Last month, I told the story of the short public life of "Microaggression — the word that died," and I'm checking again this morning for signs of life. Seeing none, I proclaim it really most sincerely dead.

Once rampant and now rare: "Addiction." I've had an "addiction" tag for a long time, and I'm always on the lookout for things getting characterized as addiction, that is, things other than the obvious substance abuse problems. This is a rhetorical move, deployed to mute individual responsibility and to stimulate a response from The Community of the Caring. Back in September, I noticed that the Chinese government was pushing the notion that people are addicted to the Internet (to justify government suppression of free speech). That's a strong sign of the dubiousness of "addiction" rhetoric. And looking over a few years of the "addiction" tag, I think the great source of awakening to the bullshit that is "addiction" talk was the notion of sex addiction, which arose in the fumbling efforts at reputation repair in the very conspicuous cases of Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner. When I dig back before that stuff, I see a lot of discussion — in the American major and new media — about internet addiction. That's in the 2005-2007-2008 period. Now, "internet addiction" talk is a Chinese government con.

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

"We were all sort of awestruck because her body looked amazing.... She looked just as comfortable in Manolos as she does when she was about to ski."

Says a Vogue editor, pushing the August issue.

The powerful, sexy image of [Lindsey] Vonn skiing on a hotel table, which appears in the August issue of Vogue, is just the latest notch in her stylish belt. In the past few months, the Olympic gold medalist has catapulted onto the fashion scene like she was jumping out of the starting gates.

With her svelte, 5-foot-10 figure and gorgeous blond mane, insiders say Vonn is poised to make a sports-to-fashion crossover....

Where does the competition end? The relationship with Tiger Woods is part of sexing her up for general celebrityhood, right?

That Woods, who was disgraced for cheating on his wife with a string of hookers, porn stars and waitresses, could be considered by Vonn to be an excellent suitor was shocking to some. Until that point, she had been perceived as a wholesome, all-American girl. But clearly she was ready for change in her life.

Win win.

He "will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. … He is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Can you identify the "he"? It's not Barack Obama. The statement was made by the man's father, quoted in an article printed in Slate in July 2000. I ran across that article, which is written by Bob Wright (whom I talk to from time to time on Bloggingheads), because I'd just done that post about the problem of shame, and I knew shame was one of Wright's big topics. (He's pro-shaming.)

The misinterpretation the Masters and Tiger Woods counted on?

Here's Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post:

On Friday, Tiger Woods made a gigantic blunder in applying the rules of golf, a brain cramp unworthy of a veteran pro.... But his subsequent mistake, taking an improper drop, ultimately cost him two shots and will haunt and may doom his chances to win this Masters.

But that’s all he did wrong.

Woods was so unaware of his gaffe that he gave three TV interviews in which he described in detail what he thought was a smart piece of strategy but was in reality a clear violation of a rule so simple many hackers grasp it.

In fact, Woods’s candid comments were the sole cause of his penalty.

It’s hard to believe that Woods, a tour pro for 17 years and a high-level competitor for more than 25, could not know or could even become temporarily confused about where you drop a ball after you hit into water.

But it is far harder to believe that Woods would deliberately break a rule, benefit by it, get away with it, sign his card for it, stand in fourth place in the Masters after 36 holes and then voluntarily tell the world every pertinent fact that could get him penalized or disqualified from the Masters. In fact, with current data, it is impossible to believe. Tiger just screwed up.

That's what Woods and the Masters officials want you to think, that Woods's self-incriminating statement is evidence that he didn't realize he'd done something wrong. But there's another interpretation: Woods made that statement to manufacture the evidence that is being interpreted to mean that he wasn't aware of the rule. He was playing dumb to avoid disqualification. Why assume dumb? I assume smart, especially since he had a lot of time to think about it, he has advisers, and it's in the interest of the Masters to keep him in the tournament for the ratings.

Here are Bill Pennington and Karen Crouse in the NYT, explaining how the officials arrived at the decision to regard this signing of an incorrect scorecard as "exceptional," thus avoiding disqualification:

A friend of a rules official saw something on television that looked improper, an illegal drop by Woods after his ball plunked into a pond at the 15th hole.

Masters officials would not reveal the identity of the texter, but the claim was brought before the Masters rules committee, which decided there was no violation. Then, about an hour later, Woods inadvertently implicated himself, saying that before dropping the ball he had taken two steps back, which was not permitted under the circumstances.

It's this time lapse that made me suspicious. The officials considered the matter, and said there was no violation, except that there was. An entire hour passes, after which Woods comes out and says something that sounds like he's casually recounting the set of events and he drops in there the statement that makes it clear he violated the rule. The fact that people like Boswell leap to read Woods's statement to mean that he didn't know he was signing an incorrect scorecard is why it could have been a brilliant scheme to plan exactly that statement in the hour that Woods had to think about how to handle the problem.

But you may ask: What about the fact the Masters rules committee had told him they'd seen no violation? I don't know what they told him. I only know what we were told, and I understand the motive for them to collude with Woods and his advisers and I know what happened an hour later.

Back to the NYT:

The process for Saturday’s ruling might have been especially delicate; removing Woods from the Masters could have ruined TV ratings and deprived the world’s top-ranked player of his best chance in several years to win his 15th major championship.

"Delicate" is a word. "Corrupt" is another.

But Masters officials said neither Woods’s popularity nor his pursuit of history was a factor. They had absolved him of wrongdoing on Friday; a day later, they said they could not impose the harsh penalty that goes with signing an incorrect scorecard — disqualification — because their earlier decision mitigated his culpability.

In my conspiracy theory, the officials knew on Friday that they needed to disqualify him, but they didn't want to lose him, and they created a time window that allowed Woods to do his innocent dumb guy performance, after which they'd assess the 2-stroke penalty and the sportswriters like Boswell — who also benefit, getting to write about Tiger and not all those other golfers few readers care about — spin the story the way they need it: Somehow the well-seasoned Woods forgot a basic rule of golf because there's no way he'd describe doing exactly what we can see him do on the video unless he thought there was nothing wrong with it.

I don't know what went on behind the scenes. I'm just saying those who hear Woods's statement and think it can only mean one thing are plainly wrong. Think of the motives and think of that 1-hour time gap. There is a lot of money at stake here, and there's a concurrence of interests between the golf authorities and Woods.

ADDED: "Even if they told me I could play, I would slam my trunk and be on my way up the road."

Tiger Woods incriminates himself: "Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot..."

"... because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit. And that should land me short of the flag and not have it either hit the flag or skip over the back.... I felt that that was going to be the right decision to take off four right there. And I did. It worked out perfectly."

Penalized 2 strokes for breaking a rule. Ironically, he had just yesterday opined "Well, rules are rules" when asked about the 1-stroke penalty given to Guan Tianlang — the 14-year-old who made the cut at the Masters — for slow play.

ADDED: Why wasn't Woods disqualified? He's ratings.