Eating Crow With Tiger Woods

 To prove how much I know and how much pull I have in the national media, I wrote a column last Wednesday headed "Leave Tiger Woods Alone."

All  I can say is that I still cling to that notion. That Tiger Woods' private life is none of our damned business. Well, it is now, thanks to TMZ, several dozen or so scarlet ladies and every media outlet on the planet. The avalanche of bad publicity about Tiger was brought on by himself.

It became even more bizarre yesterday as we learned his mother-in-law who had been living with the couple, their two children and his mother was taken to the hospital by ambulance. His home in that gated community has turned into a house of horrors. There is a room so badly damaged Tiger refused the local police to enter.

I'm still uncertain as the rest of us what transpired the morning after Thanksgiving when the barefoot icon of golf smashed his Cadillac SUV into a fire plug and tree.The resst, as they say, is history.

Some day in the not so distant future -- probably in seven weeks -- Tiger will emerge and play in his first tournament. It's the San Diego Open at Torrey Pines. Tod Leonard, the golf writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, describes the preparation going on at this moment. It a jaw-dropping account.

The public's thirst for scintillating X-rated details of Tiger's sex life seems as unquenchable as his own. It reminds me of an autobiography by Wilt Chamberlain who claimed he had sex with more than 2,000 different women. I did the math and came away stupefied.

The strange thing is, I don't care if Tiger is a womanizer. The reality of it all is that neither he, nor his wife nor his mistresses are anywhere close to being victimized by his escapades. Rather, it is his two children. Yes, they will receive all the amenities money can buy. But as any kid from a broken home will tell you, there's more to growing up than that.

Finally, don't sell Tiger short on the golf course. It's in his DNA to compartmentalize and pulverize the opposition. I'm rooting for him to win more than the 18 majors now owned by Jack Niclaus. For it is his golf game that I marvel. Not him as a person for he is undeserving.

Which is what we get when we erroneously transfer celebrity stardom to standards the Pope would be hard pressed to follow.