Column: We should not be shocked by Woods’ faults

For those of you who have just returned from a voyage to the moon or a three-week acid trip, there have been a number of stories in the newspapers lately about a guy named Tiger Woods. You probably know him as the world’s greatest golfer, the face of Nike and Gatorade or that guy who wears a red shirt and violently fist-pumps whenever he sinks a key putt on a summer Sunday.

But two weeks ago, Tiger’s reputation took a turn for the worse. Actually, that’s an understatement. Tiger’s reputation went hang-gliding, ran into a cliff, did a triple flip and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. That still might be an understatement, but let’s try not to get carried away.

The short version of the story is that Tiger Woods was injured in a late-night, one-person car accident in his driveway the Friday after Thanksgiving. That would have been strange enough, except that following this accident, Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren, rescued Tiger from the car by bashing the back windshield open with a golf club.

Then things really started getting crazy. Over the next week, Tiger was linked to having an extramarital affair to one woman, then another and another. When all was said and done, Tiger Woods — Mr. Immaculate, America’s most iconic athlete since Michael Jordan, sports’ first billion-dollar man — had been linked to upwards of 16 women. This past Saturday, Woods announced on his website that he was taking an indefinite leave from golf to repair the damages to his family that his infidelity had caused. To call these past few weeks shocking would be like, well, saying that all those late nights Woods spent at the driving range, he was working on his 7-iron.

But to be brutally honest, how shocking was Woods’ behavior? When was the last time we saw Tiger interact with a spectator on a golf course when he wasn’t barking at that middle-aged man in the goofy hat snapping a photo during his backswing.

We knew next to nothing about Tiger — only that he had ice in his veins, raked in over $100 million in endorsements each year and had a penchant for winning golf tournaments at a rate that defies logic. We loved to adore Tiger, to sit glued to the couch and watch as he mounted his patented “Tiger charge” on Sunday afternoon, to pump our fists when his putt fell on the 18th green and he lifted the championship trophy yet again.

Now we know a little more about Tiger, that he wasn’t the infallible, unbeatable, impenetrable golf robot we thought he was. And we also know that Tiger fits in nicely with a pretty impressive list of athletes who have been named as having had extramarital affairs. Here’s a list of names: Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds. That’s just a brief excerpt from a much longer list of famous athletes who, to put it in the polite words of Bill Clinton, caused harm to their marriages.

Granted, we looked at Woods differently from the other athletes on this list. For years, Tiger was all that was good about sports: family man, father of two, best golfer in the world with a charitable foundation in his name as a bonus. So what if he wouldn’t give you the time of day if he had the last watch remaining in the world? As long as he kept winning, we didn’t care. We wanted to view Tiger as more than a good athlete. We wanted him to be a good person, a role model and a symbol of all that was good about sports.

That was our mistake. Athletes aren’t paid to be good people, they are paid to be incredibly good at sports. Just look at the past few years as an example: Michael Vick gets sent to jail for directing a dog-fighting ring, Roger Clemens could still get sent to jail for perjury, and Andre Agassi recently admitted to lying about flunking a drug test (which came up positive for crystal meth) while he was still a professional tennis player. At this rate, NBA Commissioner David Stern must be sweating bullets in fear that the National Enquirer might just happen upon some dirt on LeBron James.

So do yourselves a favor: Keep watching sports, but stop trying to uphold athletes as holier-than-thou role models. In a world where professional athletes are constantly surrounded by beautiful women, it’s inevitable that more than a few of them will slip up and do something they regret the next morning. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be angry when athletes cheat on their wives, but rather that, when we expect professional athletes to be perfect citizens, we’re only setting ourselves up for failure.

Sure, Tiger Woods wasn’t the guy we thought he was, but that’s as much our fault as his.