Tiger great, not good, so what?

Rather, it was for golf -- you remember that he does play that game, too, and is quite good at it. In fact, some people say that he is the best there ever was (at golf; none of his 14 mistresses has yet said he is the best at the other).

That shock is not really surprising. We tend to expect the people we admire for a particular skill to be role models for the rest of us in all other aspects of their lives as well.

If you're going to be famous, then, you had better be perfect, as Woods has learned through the loss of endorsements because he is no longer seen as a role model -- what would it mean, some pundit wondered this week, if a wife gave her husband a pair of Nikes for Christmas; what kind of mixed message would she be sending him? Would she be giving him the green light to go out and boink 14 other women -- Tiger's count to date? Would she be saying I know what you're up to; or, I've got my eye on you? Or would she just be giving him an overpriced pair of runners? Life will never be the same, post-Tiger.

If it is any comfort to Woods, he is in distinguished company. Being great has nothing to do with being good. It never has and it never will.

When I was 17 years old, I read Somerset Maugham's signature novel Of Human Bondage. I thought it was the best book that had ever been written and I had, until then, been a bookish boy so I had many other books to compare with it.

One can read Of Human Bondage at just about any post-pubescent age and appreciate it -- although it is a novel primarily meant for adults. I have read it twice again and enjoyed it each time -- it is an enlightening, inspiring and, most commonly, deeply depressing examination of human nature. I no longer think it's the best book that was ever written -- who can say what that book really is? -- but it is exactly what a 17-year-old needs to get him ready for the dating scene and marriage.

Somerset Maugham himself, however, was an extraordinarily unpleasant and vindictive man who died bitter and alone, abandoned by everyone but his homosexual boy-toy who stuck around in the hope of getting an inheritance (he did.)

When I was about 27, I read Ernest Hemingway's Nobel-prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea. By then, of course, I was far too sophisticated to believe that anything could be "the best," but that book remains one of my favourites.

Hemingway himself, however, was an extraordinarily unpleasant person who, if you remove the genius, represented just about everything one might dislike in a man -- he was a bully, a braggart, a womanizer and a bad drunk.

Richard Wagner was one of Germany's -- the world's -- greatest composers and a virulent anti-Semite whose magnificent Ring of the Nibelung, although not anti-Semitic in itself, served as inspirational music for the Nazis a century later. Arthur Rimbaud and his occasional lover, Paul Verlaine, were two seminal poets in 19th century France, yet Verlaine was clearly mentally unbalanced and Rimbaud was variously a pedophile, thief, cheat and even a slave trader.

The sports world itself is filled with players who are poets when they perform but are truly perverse in their private lives -- Ty Cobb was a great baseball player but a monstrous man -- and as for Hollywood, well, let's not even go there.

The point is that the genius and the morality are entirely different things. When we read Of Human Bondage, when we listen to Wagner or watch monstrous men play baseball brilliantly, we don't think about their personal faults and failings. We just think of the works of art they are giving us. Tiger Woods has given us many of those moments on the golf course. There is no question that he is the athlete of the decade. There is not even any real debate about it. He may be a libertine -- he seems undoubtedly to be a libertine -- and we may cluck and curse and cavil about his personal life, but it is really none of our business.

That is -- or should be -- between him and Mrs. Woods. Our only business is how well he plays the game -- golf, that is. Elin Woods, according to the gossip shows, is planning to divorce him anyway, so he might as well head back to golf course, where his poetry in motion is all that matters.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 19, 2009 A19