Dear Tiger Part Deux

We, that is western society have held you to impossible standards. Because of your superior golf abilities we placed you on a level above the rest of us and in doing so we raised our expectations of you. We took the liberty of deciding that just because you could put a little ball into a little cup with a skill that most of us would-be duffers only dream about that somehow you are superior to us. And with that ascension came our elevated expectations.

And with our elevated expectations came elevated levels of pressure down on your head because we take these expectations of our world at large, and to be sure your world is larger than most, and we make them our own. It is so very hard when everyone around you is telling you how great you are to feel like you don’t have to live up to those expectations and so you spend your life striving to do so. And it is so very hard and takes always so much energy to live a life that becomes unconsciously all about meeting those expectations. It is hard when others expect things of us, things they don’t see in themselves, things they would like to see in themselves. They see them in you, they tell you how fortunate you are to possess those qualities, how envious they are of you and you have no choice but to believe them. So year after year after year you try to live up to those expectations all the while staggering under the weight of the effort it takes to do so.

I was a little hard on you in my first letter and I would like to take this opportunity to soften my stance a bit. While I stand by my assertion that you should have immediately and simply come clean, it might have lightened the press coverage just a hair, it is clear to me that a young man like you who was probably raised to be a decent person is somehow crumbling under the weight of our expectations and for this I can only apologize.

To Mrs. Tiger I would like to say please don’t listen to all the people around you who are telling you what a lying, cheating, evil, SOB your husband is. I know you are probably hurt very deeply by his actions but if you love him allow yourself the opportunity to come to an understanding of why he felt the need to do this. I guarantee you that while doing so will be immensely difficult you will also find out that he is probably not the over-sexed, uncaring louse he appears to be, or rather that we all, in our knee-jerk reactions to marital infidelity insist that he is.

Respectfully,

Me