New turn in Tiger Woods saga; all previous bets are off

(Note: As if the news reported in the initial entry, that Woods’s wife Elin Nordregen is divorcing him, were not sensational enough, see John Hagan’s theory that Woods is on steroids. And it’s not just John’s intuition. Sportwriter Bill Plaschke of the L.A. Times argues persuasively that it’s true.)

Ben W. writes:

All those plans that had Tiger rehabilitating his image by “working” on his marriage are going down the drain. All he had to do to “manage” the situation was to turn his focus on his family and “work things out.”

So much for the calculated plans and schedules of expert advisors. People magazine reports:

The holidays may bring a final showdown in the marriage of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, a source close to the golfer’s wife tells PEOPLE, saying, “She plans to leave Tiger.”

Another source says, “She’s made up her mind. There’s nothing to think about: he’s never going to change,” PEOPLE reports in its upcoming issue, on newsstands Friday.

Photos circulated this week, showing Nordegren, 29, pumping gas into her vehicle near the couple’s home in Windermere, Fla., last Saturday, also captured the Swedish-born former nanny and mother of two (Sam, 2, and Charlie, 10 months), not wearing her wedding ring.

While the missing band “meant nothing,” insists a source, a high-profile Florida divorce attorney tells PEOPLE that Nordegren has met with lawyers to renegotiate the Woods’ prenuptial agreement.

On Thursday, workers began moving large items including what appeared to be works of art out of the couple’s home in Windermere, Fla., and Nordegren was seen giving them instructions, according to the New York Post.

LA replies:

Yes, I saw that story earlier this evening. It said a source close to the Woods says they are going to divorce. The line, “She’s made up her mind. There’s nothing to think about: he’s never going to change,” had the ring of truth to me. But if there is no marital reconciliation in the cards, then the whole issue of him reforming himself or even pretending to reform himself is off the table. How can he reform himself or pretend to reform himself in order to save his marriage if his marriage is over? Which leads to the next question. What is there left for him to do now? There is nothing for him to do but to get all the way into the swinging single life. The story I saw said that he was looking for a place to go hang out with male friends.

But whatever he does now, especially in his unreformed state, will be rather uncomfortable for him. Can you imagine what it’s like when six billion people, every person you encounter, every woman you encounter, knows all about your sex life? How can he comfortably make his usual moves on women, when every woman on the planet knows his moves? (And by the way I still do not understand why so many of his girlfriends, whom he had not harmed, have harmed him with all the details about the affairs.) Not that there will be any shortage. The attraction of sexually liberated females to alpha males, whether of the criminal type or the celebrity type, will continue unabated. If women hook up with convicted murderers in prison, Tiger Woods will have no problem finding lots of willing females happy to hook up with a “disgraced” celebrity adulterer.

However, if he now simply embarks on the Playboy lifestyle, how can he win back the favor of advertisers?

Here’s the problem: his former image is in tatters, and, absent the repentant project of fixing or pretending to fix his behavior and saving his marriage, there is no way for him to get it back.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

You wrote, “Can you imagine what it’s like when six billion people, every person you encounter, every woman you encounter, knows all about your sex life?”

I used to wonder the same thing about Bill Clinton. If I were he, I would have felt so disgraced I would have had to cloister myself in a remote monastery. But it never seemed to bother him that much. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be devoid of shame. The two situations are different in that Clinton’s proclivities were hardly a secret when he was elected, while Tiger’s success is tied to the false image he had constructed. He can continue to compete in golf, and will no doubt continue to get the sleazy sort of women he fancies (as does O.J.), but his endorsement days are over. He played the public for fools.

I saw a commenter at another site who said that the worst thing about this whole affair is that it reinforces the stereotypes people have about black men. I think we can all agree it would be great if black men would stop constantly reinforcing those “stereotypes.”

John Hagan writes:

The next, and final Woods scandal: steroids. That’s the body of an NFL linebacker. It’s physiologically impossible to add that much muscle mass after age twenty-five, let alone in your early 30s.

LA replies:

Woods on steroids? Whoa …

LA continues:

His excessively toned and shaped physique—a body-builder’s physique which by the way does not fit the aesthetic of golf—adds to the negative impression I’ve always had of him as a kind of machine, a walking corporation and product endorsement, not a human being. He’s manufactured. And inside that synthetic, manufactured image, there is the reality of his tawdry sex life, in which he’s engaged in the nonstop pursuit and management of multiple girlfriends at the same time.

So, he’s a mechanical man on the outside, and a relentless, soulless skirt chaser on the inside. This is the reality of Woods.

But you have no info about him and steroids, right? This is just a supposition based on his physique.

John Hagan replies

He’s juiced. Look at his behavior on the golf course. The swearing, the throwing of clubs around. His doctor was arrested in Canada this fall carrying the performing enhancement drug HGH. I know my way around the gym. It’s not probable that he gained this kind of muscle mass in his 30s. Look at pictures of him in his mid-twenties. He was a beanpole.

LA replies:

While not having an opinion either way on your steroids theory, I disagree that a man cannot gain significant muscle mass in his 30s. If you start working out, you gain muscle mass. I went through a period in my early 30s of working out fairly seriously and my whole body changed. After a six day canoeing trip five years ago, when I was well beyond my thirties, my whole body looked different. The body responds very dramatically to serious exercise.

John Hagan replies:

There is no public proof, yet, that he’s on the juice. Just observation, and an understanding that human physiology can’t accommodate the kind of muscle mass that he’s acquired in his 30s. I’ve worked out with steroid users, people on HGH, and many different kinds of performance enhancing drugs, and he shows all the signs of a juicer.

John Hagan continues:

I agree with you to a point. I’ve been a serious athlete my whole life. I used to run 70 miles a week, lift weights 3 days a week. I was just relentless. But to put on 30 pounds of muscle mass at his age would be unusual, if not impossible.

A quick story. When I was a student at Harvard I worked out with the several members of the U.S. Olympic handball team. The coaching staff thought I had a chance of making the team, but as the training progressed I started to fall behind even though I was working out like a madman.

Finally, I was told in no uncertain terms that without steroid use I would never be able to get a spot on the team. I walked away from it all very disgusted, but I learned a lesson. Every person on that team was juicing, but my health and integrity was more important to me than team handball, lol.

LA replies:

If this turned out to be true …

Prior to the current scandal, I would have said that this was absolutely impossible. But given the multitudinous layers of cynical deceit on which his life has been constructed, I can no longer say that.

John Hagan writes:

Woods was seeing the same doctor that U.S. Olympic swimmer Danna Torres was going to. she’s the women that was setting swimming records at 41 ! She had better times at 41 than she had a 25. I’m pushing 50…….I’ve seen what I can do now, and what I used to do, so I would not be surprised to see Woods, or almost any athlete these days on drugs. They really work quite well. Woods seems like the kind of risk-taker that would use something like HGH. But your point stands. We don’t know if Woods is using.

LA writes:

Qualifying a couple of my remarks. I described Woods as a “kind of machine, a walking corporation and product endorsement, not a human being.” This was not fair to corporations. Some corporations have integrity, while others, like Microsoft, have none. Woods is the Microsoft of athletes.

Also, I said, “So, he’s a mechanical man on the outside, and a relentless, soulless skirt chaser on the inside.”

To explain what I meant by that: I read a story in the New York Post yesterday in which one of Woods’ girlfriends, a pretty blond, recounts their affair. She actually thought she was his only amour. Then she woke up in the middle of the night in their hotel room and saw him texting a message.

A man who while sleeping with one woman is text messaging another to set up his next assignation with her—that’s a relentless, soulless, empty man. Adultery is a serious sin. But Woods goes beyond that. His sin is his lifelessness.

John writes:

Here’s one of the first mainstream articles about possible steroid abuse by Tiger Woods.

BILL PLASCHKE
Los Angeles Times
December 16, 2009

The Tiger Woods story grows bigger, and juicier

The golf great’s credibility, already eroded by marital infidelity, could evaporate entirely if there’s fire to go along with the smoke generated by his reported link to a doctor who promotes HGH.

Two years ago, after following Tiger Woods down the fairway for a couple of days at the U.S Open at Oakmont, I confided to friends an observation that seemed too absurd for public consumption.

From the back, the dude looked like Barry Bonds.

His neck was oddly wide. His shoulders were absurdly broad. His biceps were busting out of a tight shirt.

For the first time, he wasn’t just better than everyone else, he was also bigger. He looked not like a technician lining up a tee shot, but a slugger getting loose for batting practice.

He looked weird. He looked stuffed. He looked dirty.

I confided it, but never wrote it, because who would believe it?

Tiger Woods in the same sentence as the most infamous (alleged) steroid user? He was too smart, too scripted, too careful.

Thought so, anyway.

Now I wonder.

The New York Times report this week that links Woods with a doctor who promotes human growth hormone would have been silly two months ago but makes scary sense today.

If a guy is a chronic cheater off the course, what kind of leap is required to believe he could be the same sort of cheater on the course?

That distance is now a mere hop and skip after the newspaper reported that Dr. Anthony Galea is under a joint U.S.-Canadian investigation for providing athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.

One of the athletes who has rehabilitated under Galea’s care is Woods, who allegedly was visited at least four times by the doctor in Woods’ Orlando, Fla., home.

During those times, Woods’ agent claimed the golfer received nothing more than Galea’s groundbreaking platelet-rich plasma therapy for his reconstructed knee.

“The treatment Tiger received is a widely accepted therapy, and to suggest some connection with illegality is recklessly irresponsible,” Mark Steinberg wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.

You know what’s really recklessly irresponsible? Dealing with a doctor who has a history of using and prescribing the banned HGH substance, that’s what.

All the healers in the world, the best money can buy, and Woods chooses an eccentric 50-year-old HGH peddler who not only prescribes it to older patients, but says he injects himself five days a week to keep up with a wife who, he says, is 22 years younger?

“If the body is healthy, then your mind and intellect are free to study, to feed your spirit,” Galea told the New York Times in an interview.

Woods has been feeding his spirit quite enough, thank you.

In past cases, from Olympians to major leaguers, nearly anyone involved with a steroid salesman is eventually found to have been using steroids. Yet while the PGA Tour tests for performance-enhancing drugs, no sporting organization has found an acceptable noninvasive test for HGH.

So this story might go nowhere. But its legs have already taken it miles farther than anyone imagined, which marks the true and lasting danger of Woods’ dalliances.

The public thinks, if there’s even a chance he’s guilty of running a harem while married with two young children, there’s a chance he could be guilty of anything.

Once we realize we don’t know him, then we stop trusting him.

And once we stop trusting him, then he becomes vulnerable to people ignoring the amazing flight of his ball and concentrating on the unsettling size of his neck.

The public has already made up its mind about him, and Woods is not getting a mulligan. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll this week, Woods’ favorable rating has fallen to 33% from a poll-record high 88% in 2000.

As the public leaves him, so do advertisers, with global consulting firm Accenture PLC completely dumping him and Gillette pulling his commercials indefinitely.

Then there’s Phil Knight, Nike chairman and Woods’ sponsorship godfather, who told SportsBusiness Journal that he considers Woods’ infidelity issues “a minor blip” in his career.

If all this turns out to be only about infidelity, perhaps he’s right.

But if Woods is also sleeping with HGH, the blip becomes a boom.

Woods won’t just lose all his endorsements—when was the last time you saw Barry Bonds selling anything?—but he’ll also lose his last bastion of support, his galleries.

Even those guys wearing plaid pants and fat cigars don’t much tolerate golf cheats. If golf fans go nuts when they think a guy is using a juiced driver, imagine what they’ll think about a juiced body.

And, yeah, it’s fair to openly wonder now whether Woods is juiced.

We freely wonder the same thing about other pro athletes, don’t we? Through all this, the sad reality is that the once-supernatural Tiger Woods has become one of them, nothing special anymore, now perceived as just another jock for hire who will do anything to win.

Yeah, it’s a real shame Tiger Woods’ name is being written in the same sentence as Barry Bonds’.

Or is it the other way around?

bill.plaschke@latimes.com

LA replies:

This is astounding. [Note: the actual language I used in my reply to Mr. Hagan was a good deal more colorful than this, but the editor of this website must maintain a certain propriety.]

John replies:

I think he’s going to be exposed. I like golf. A game of gentlemen who police themselves on the golf course. I like the order, the esthetics. It’s a game of the West in many respects. It’s refined. It’s balanced. I suspect the image Woods needed to project was forced upon him by his management because that’s what golf is, or was about. In America everything is degraded now…. Woods is just a symptom of that decline.

LA replies:

Do you realize that Woods is turning out to be Obama? The comparison was made at the beginning of the affair, in relation to the idea that both were being exposed as phonies. But here’s the theory that comes to me now. Why did Woods always encase himself in his product endorsements, his Nike logo, his baseball cap with Nike logo that seemed to be surgically attached to his skull, his mechanistic persona and devotion to nothing but winning? Because as a non white he couldn’t relate in a natural way to the game of golf and to his fellow golfers. So he related to the world of golf, this quintessential white man’s game, through this super controlled, “elite” persona. He was always encased in his specialness, always apart from his fellow golfers. And the media fed that, by treating him as above all other golfers, a golden demi god compared to the white shlumps, the Untermenschen.

In the same way, Obama could never relate to America, because of his race. He could only relate to America artificially, by putting on a series of carefully controlled acts and personae, or ideologically, by trying to transform America into something else.

On another point, how did you come to write to me tonight about the steroid issue? Was it because you had these thoughts, and then Bill Plaschke’s article triggered you to say it out loud? Or were you already saying these things, and then by chance you saw that Plaschke was saying the same thing.

I’m a believer. Reading Plaschke’s description of Woods’s physical appearance, and of his use of that doctor, and of the known pattern of HGH users, I’m believing it.

John replies:

I agree with the Woods-Obama comparison you made. And what’s depressing about it is the reality that a non-white America is not possible. It’s just the reality of race. Thomas Jefferson was one hundred percent correct in his understanding of race relations in America. It’s not going to end well.

I’ve had my suspicions about Woods’s possible steroid use for years. No golfer in history has been able to hit the ball out of the rough like he has. It takes almost super human strength to do it, and do it well so it lands on the green and near the cup. The TV announcers ALWAYS say that no one in the sport can, or ever has done this on a consistent basis.

The article in the LA Times just confirmed some of my suspicions. And those pictures of him…. yikes, look at him.

LA replies:

What are the legal ramifications of this possible usage within the PGA?

John replies:

If they want to expose him, and that will be difficult because the masking-agents for steroids are very sophisticated, I suspect they will suspend him for a short time. But the PGA has never found steroid use yet among its golfers, so I’m not sure what they would do.

December 17

OI writes:

You wrote “Can you imagine what it’s like when six billion people, every person you encounter, every woman you encounter, knows all about your sex life? How can he comfortably make his usual moves on women, when every woman on the planet knows his moves?”

This is where we get back to the Game discussion. The whole reason the ideas behind Game came into existence is in response to the fact that there is a non-trivial number of women out there who LIKE encountering men like this, and reward them sexually; and in the attempt to make sense of that fact.

You’re still making the social-conservative assumption that women are fundamentally moral. Experimentally, that can be seen to be not true (or at least not universally so). Women knowing a cad’s moves doesn’t cripple the cad, it makes things easier for him, because a non-trivial number of women will deliberately place themselves in a position to be picked up and used.

We could wish that wasn’t true. Wishing doesn’t make the actual observable behavior of women today go away.

LA replies:

You’re making an interesting point but it’s not really relevant to my point. I was not making a moral point. I was not saying that it would now be difficult for Woods to succeed in his usual moves on women because women would know those moves and, being moral, morally disapprove of them. I was saying that it would now be uncomfortable for Woods to make his usual moves on women simply because every woman he encounters will know all his moves. As a result of his various mistresses’ betrayal of him to the media, telling in detail about their relationships with him, he has suffered the most radical loss of privacy ever suffered by a human being, in which his most intimate behaviors, especially his methods of approaching, wooing, and manipulating and keeping the affection of women, are now known by everyone on the planet. ”

Josh F. writes:

I think the bigger lesson to be learned from the Tiger saga, even more so than the fall of Obama from godhood or the decline of that first race transcending persona, Michael Jackson, is that whatever liberals create, it will destroy itself.

LA replies:

Yes, that’s interesting. Because whatever liberalism creates, it creates on a false, liberal basis.

Karen writes from England:

Every major international athlete is on juice. Those who resist don’t generally get into the Olympics, and other teams and coaches who refuse to drug their athletes get sidelined. It is no surprise that Tiger Woods is on drugs and all the relevant agencies will be helping him to cover it up. His physicians will be ahead of the drug testing organisations; his coaches and agents will all know but conceal it. Even the PGA and all his sponsors will know. It is obvious from the pictures that he is chemically enhanced. He is bulked up like a weight lifter but without doing the training. [LA replies: But he has done the training, hasn’t he?] He probably has the mood swings and aggression which go with it as well, which might partly explain his behaviour. No one will do anything unless he is exposed and then they will all condemn him and shun him whilst turning to support the next juiced up athlete. Sport has been corrupted. The aim is to win at any price.

Tiger Woods’s main distinction may have been to taint golf with the same corruption which has damaged track and field.

Gintas writes:

I heard the association of Woods with steroids back when he first got buff. The big question was “why?” He was already so good.

David B. writes:

When the Tiger Woods scandal broke, I was searching the Web and one of the columnists I read had a revealing comment. He wrote that one of the sad things about Woods’s fall from grace was that Woods was a “multicultural hero.”

The media and the culture as a whole have had a lot invested in “Tiger Woods.” I wrote you several months ago that today we are told who our sports heroes are supposed to be, rather than it being someone whose performance we enjoy.

From the time he emerged, all organs of the media declared that “everybody roots for Tiger Woods.” I saw this theme over and over in hand-wringing columns by sportswriters, whom we have previously agreed are ususally liberals of the most obnoxious kind.

LA writes:

Imagine the racial ramifications of this. The media has treated Woods as the nonwhite sports messiah, rendering all white golfers irrelevent, almost non-persons. For the last 13 years, only Woods has really mattered, with him apart from all other golfers, on his own level. And him as nonwhite symbol. If this turned out to be the product of steroids….

OI replies to LA’s earlier reply:

Yes. I agree with all that. However, given that he’s a cad, it’s not something that will really bother him—or if it does, it’s something he will get over. If it was fundamental to his character, he wouldn’t have been behaving that way in the first place—he was doing it quietly because the squeaky-clean image was worth a lot of money. Now that’s gone, but it’s not as if there’s no precedent for athletes and others living publicly decadent lifestyles but still pulling in endorsements and invitations to the right parties.

What you described would be a problem for a normal, ordinary person—a problem arising from internal morals. I’m pretty sure it won’t be a problem for Woods.

Evan H. writes:

For what it’s worth, Steve Sailer wrote an article back in May about the possibility Woods was on steroids. It’s very speculative and mostly consists of analysis of statements by other pro golfers and by Woods’s trainer, but it shows that the idea has been floating around for a while.

Karen replies to LA:

No, he hasn’t done the training. Tiger Woods hasn’t trained as a weight lifting power athlete although he might have lifted some weights. There is a difference between the training of a golfer who lifts weights to help his golf swing and the training of an athlete who lifts weights to compete in that category. Tiger has never competed as anything other than a golfer as far as I know.

A reader writes:

I remember hearing that Woods could bench 350. This was at least 6-7 years ago. I was skeptical when I heard this. Most people don’t bench close to twice their weight, and those that can don’t seem to have his tall and lanky build. Some people are freakishly strong for their size, and this would certainly have been consistent with the image created of an athletic freak of nature. There’s no question he got bulkier in the past few years, though, especially in the upper body. I was always suspicious of his ubiquitously listed vital stats of 6’2”, 180, they seemed out-of-date. I thought he must be at least in the neighborhood of 200 if not more. The steroid use would certainly explain his consistently cranky, petulant behavior.

You mentioned that Tiger was always treated as one apart from or transcending his fellow golfers. Ain’t that the truth. It seemed like other golfers were walking on eggshells around him. Not only was he the superstar of his sport, he was a multiracial minority, which put him completely beyond criticism. Once another golfer had the audacity to criticize him for something and he had to backtrack and grovel for months afterwards to redeem himself. It seemed like running afoul of St. Tiger could jeopardize anyone’s career, even for established golfers. I won’t say I’m surprised at his downfall. Like you I never bought into his manufactured persona, I always thought he was a jerk. I don’t think anyone else was given a free pass to violate golf’s unspoken rules of decorum the way Tiger was when he threw one of his frequent temper tantrums. Maybe it’s not right to engage in schadenfreude at his downfall, but it’s hard not to.

LA writes:

Spencer Warren reminds me of this comment he made about Woods in a VFR entry in June 2007:

Also, Woods is a massive egomaniac. His belligerent fist pumping and carrying on when he makes a big putt is bad sportsmanship by the standards of golf. No one else does this on a regular basis as he does. His garb of a red shirt (for the “tiger”) for his final round on Sundays also is egotistical and perhaps part of an effort at psychological intimidation of his opponents, which, again, is bad sportsmanship in golf. Arnold Palmer in the fifties, sixties and seventies and, before him, Ben Hogan in the forties and fifties (indeed all golfers then), dressed plainly because to do otherwise in those days just was showy and thus bad form.

The initial entry, which was also by Spencer Warren, concerned John Derbyshire’s praise of Woods as a “class act” because Woods did not sell his new born daughter’s photos for millions but displayed them free on the Web. I commented:

Mr. Warren is right. Derbyshire perfectly expresses the degraded American ethos of our time, according to which anyone who behaves better than the most vulgar and degraded, is a “class-act.”

The entry also touches on the cultural significance of the Woods’ naming their daughter “Sam.”

Rick U. writes:

Karen’s assertion that Tiger doesn’t work out is simply false- See Here. I don’t know about the “juicing” allegation, but he has worked on his strength since very early in his career. I will admit to being a big fan of Tiger’s as a golfer(his temper is contrary to golf etiquette), but I never have thought him to be some kind of demigod either.

December 18 1 a.m.

Larry G. writes:

“Sport has been corrupted.”

In today’s world, what has not been corrupted?

LA writes:

In the next comment Josh F. has concocted a fanciful “macro-economic theory” of the rise and fall of Tiger Woods. His theory reminds me of the attempts of Marxists to come up with an all-encompassing theory that explains every aspect of the capitalist economy. I don’t understand it, and normally I don’t post things that I myself don’t understand, but perhaps others will, and so I’m breaking my usual rule and posting it.

Josh F. writes:

There are so many fascinating angles to this Tiger saga that it’s difficult to know where to start. But here is how I see the different angles:

1. This is liberal “capitalism” at work.

2. What liberals have created (Tiger and his capital), will destroy itself (anti-capitalize).

3. We are at the last stage of a massive redistribution of wealth that started with the middle class mainstream investing “capital” in Tiger and now with Tiger in a state of anti-capitalization, the SAME liberal sharks that helped steal our money by our malinvestment in Tiger will now feed on Tiger’s “cheating” and once again “capitalize” off the American mainstream (read mostly white).

4. Just as the infidelity, Tiger’s alleged use of performance enhancing chemicals is only “cheating” in the traditional sense. Yet this does not stop liberals from “capitalizing” on the situation.

5. But herein lies the rub concerning professional sports and performance enhancement technologies. Who is drawing this arbitrary line in regards to what PERFORMANCE ENHANCING technologies we the citizens are allowed to dabble in OTHER THAN a class of elites stuffed full of PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT drugs like Viagra, Xanax, Valium, etc. And these same fools are now looking to pass legislation that makes US pay for their performance enhancing drugs.

6. The Tiger saga ultimately represents an elite struggle amongst extreme liberals with the mainstream American having his money continuously taken in all the manufactured drama.

David B. writes:

I too have suspected that Woods uses steroids. Since he was a “multicultural hero,” the media looked the other way on this as well as ignoring Woods’s liking for Las Vegas nightlife. Do you think they didn’t know that Woods often spent time there? What did they think he was doing in Las Vegas?

Another theme in so many articles is that golf can’t get along without Woods. Did the sport of golf exist before Tiger Woods? You wouldn’t think so according to some people.

The Plaschke article is another illustration of the emotional investment many had in Woods, aside from the financial one. Liberals always think their illusions will work no matter how many times they fail.

LA replies:

The myth of the transcendent importance and indispensability of Woods is driven 100 percent by his race. It tells us that the (white) game of golf is essentially worthless without the nonwhite god Woods, that it is only the presence of his divinity that makes golf worthwhile. This is simply an application to golf of what liberal propaganda is telling society as a whole. Any all-white grouping is boring, unalive, and at least implicitly racist and oppressive. Only the presence of approved nonwhites makes society morally legitimate and humanly positive.

In the kind of conservative politics I believe in, white conservatives would actively these so-far unchallenged liberal myths that are used to break down whites’ spirit and make them submit to their destroyers.

.

Howard Sutherland writes:

I’m pretty sure Steve Sailer (who, as we all know, is fascinated by sporting oddities like Mr. Woods) has made a tentative case, either at VDare or the iSteve blog, that Woods had turned to steroids. I think it was two years or more ago.

M. Jose writes:

Karen asserts that Tiger bulked up without doing the training. I think that this is very unlikely. As I understand it, steroids really don’t help you out unless you do the training.

As for whether or not Tiger could have bulked up like this naturally, Steve Sailer (in the article that Evan H. cites) suggests that it is unusual for a person Tiger’s age to bulk up like this, but not as unbelievable as someone Barry Bonds’ age.

One question that no one has addressed yet is whether Tiger’s sexual proclivities have been part of his behavior from the start or a result of the steroid use. I wonder if Tiger may have at one point been a lot closer to the family-friendly person everyone thought he was, and if he did take steroids, if that enhanced his sex drive and desire for promiscuity.

Ferg writes:

I have not read the article yet and it is too late tonight. However, a well-cut, very strong man at the gym I belonged to in San Diego told me once that “there are NO supreme performers in any field of athletic endeavor, no really cut and shaped body builders, no great runners, who are NOT now on steroids, or were on them very recently”. He freely admitted to doing a cycle of “‘roids” every six weeks. He stated that that is the norm. I have no way of knowing if he was accurate in his estimation, but I had no real reason to doubt him. One of the girls at the gym was growing a mustache and I commented on it. He said, “Don’t you know she is doing ‘roids to try and build her body so she can stay on the Fire Department”? After I left San Diego, I heard from a friend that the woman had failed the physical test but was kept on as a driver.

So, we have a woman using illegal drugs in order to stay in a public job with some police powers. Makes me wonder how many do it to try and keep jobs as cops.

December 18

Karen writes:

I am not saying that Tiger does not work out and train. All athletes do. But their regime is tailored to the type of event in which they compete. The training of a weight lifter is different from that of a golfer or sprinter, although they all do exercises in common. If Tiger trained as a weight lifter in order to get his muscles bulked up as they are, he would have no time to play golf.

LA replies:

It is strange, and I don’t know if it has been previously addressed, why Woods, well into his career and at the top of the golf world, decided to develop such a “non-golfer” type physique. Maybe it was just about increasing his upper body strength which he felt would improve his game further. Or maybe he just wanted to have that type of physique for its own sake, not directly connected with golf.

Robert B. writes:

Tiger Woods was entirely made up by his father and Nike—who produced special golf balls, shoes and clubs for him that enabled his early wins—it was a political statement by the owner of nike who apparently hates whites and wanted to take the last bastion (other than hockey) away from white sportsmen. You know, the people who invented every sport in the world other than just running.

LA replies:

What is your evidence that the owner of Nike has it in for whites (not that I don’t believe it)? And are you saying that Nike give Woods clubs and balls that were outside regulation?

” … the people who invented every sport in the world other than just running.”

Good one.

Robert replies:

Yes—Nike did in fact do this for him—they were not out of regulation, but they were very advanced and only Tiger had them his first four or five years on the PGA. Then it came out and the items were offered for sale to everyone. If you were good, the driver/ball combination alone would give you an extra 100 yards on a drive. Once everyone else had the gear, Tiger was no longer a sure win as he had been.

December 19

Karen writes:

No one goes on steroids just to get a particular type of physique, except perhaps a few amateur (and often deluded) weight lifters. The elite athletes and sportsmen always have a reason to start doping and it is always performance related. I suspect that once he got to the top, he was afraid of declining performance or complacency or competition and he wanted to push his success further and milk it to the full. Steroids allow an athlete to train longer and harder with shorter recovery times. His chemically enhanced performance kept him well ahead of the other non juiced players and secured his place at the top for a long time. He has made the most of it with the sponsorship deals and has made a lot of money. Having got away with high risk behaviour (cheating in golf) and going undetected for a long time, he has become arrogant and reckless and started cheating in other areas of life. His extra marital affairs are a symptom of that. Suddenly he was caught and the house of cards fell down.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 16, 2009 11:57 PM | Send