The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.
But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence —
one sentence:
Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.
Diagram that. The subject and verb are:
story and
has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.
Then there's this insight into emptiness:
In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.
Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.
... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.
This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's
apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! —
pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.
At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....
I'll spare you the spoiler.
But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.
What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive.
A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular
kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has
fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.
It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....
The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their
mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?
With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.
Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.
Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.
Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade
upward?
... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.
Swirling, eh? Is it swirling upward or downward?
... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.
Well, I don't know who
you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.
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