What a Crash

Incredibly, Tiger Woods may not have enough money to buy his way out of this. Or, to put it another way, how many degrees of fucked can one man be and still find somebody to cash a personal check?

British tabloids, the authority in these matters, scored Woods with nine mistresses Sunday night. On Monday morning, the Americans countered with ten. That was bid up the following day with news that his after-car-wreck hospital paperwork contained the notation “OD.”

Woods can go on Oprah, admit to sex addiction, drug addiction, throw in alcoholism, abusive parents, lonely at the top, cry, grovel, ask for forgiveness, then check into the Betty Ford Center, pour a stiff drink, and get ready to play golf in January.

That’s the normal choreography, but I’m not sure it will work this time. Tiger is probably constitutionally unable to rip out his guts in public, plus he has the added silence incentive of having a lot more stuff to hide. If he makes a full-on honest confession, even three-legged dogs will run from the sound of his name.

He has his golf game, for now, so he doesn’t have to humiliate himself on national TV in order to pay rent. On the other hand, his mistress count is too high for him to get off with a “I let down my family, now leave me alone” plea deal. One thing we know, staying where he is will not be possible. The following was published in the Daily Mirror, a Brit tabloid, and will seem impossibly innocent by Sunday night:

“Woods is a sexual predator who goes hunting for women on booze-fuelled benders in Sin City Las Vegas, according to showbiz insiders.” And, “Sources say the ‘sex-addict’ golfer likes to sit at VIP tables ogling girls dancing knickerless above him while quaffing $300 bottles of champagne. Just last month he got so drunk friends had to carry him out of one of the city’s top clubs.”

One more week of this and Tiger will pine for the days when he only had to pay off one wife and ten women. I’m not going to go into Tiger details here because I just finished breakfast, the story has turned pathetic, and now, with news of Ambien and Vicodin, looks to become tragic.

Young, handsome, rich, famous, beloved, earns a billion dollars, and the best he can do is a porn actress, San Diego cocktail waitress, Vegas night-club marketing manager, Vegas cocktail waitress, Orlando waitress, New York City society parasite, New York nightclub promoter, and so on. That’s sad.

Regard another superstar athlete and how he handled scandal. Granted, his were of a smaller scale (everything is smaller scale compared to Tiger), but some of his scandals were criminal offenses, which gives him scandal bonus points. Introducing Charles Barkley.

You know Barkley — he played 16 seasons in the NBA, league MVP, 11-time NBA All-Star, owns two Olympic gold medals, NBA Hall of Fame inductee, analyst for TNT -- a real-deal celebrity. Here’s a portion of his rap sheet:

December 1991. Barkley is arrested in Milwaukee on a battery charge. He’d gotten into an after-hours fight with a 25-year-old male, broke his nose, bloodied his face (jury found him not guilty).

October 1997. Barkley is arrested for throwing a man through an Orlando bar’s plate-glass window. The man had thrown a glass of ice at him. Barkley told the judge he regretted they were not on a higher floor.

May 2008. Wynn Las Vegas files a civil complaint stating Barkley owes them $400,000. Barkley says, “It’s my fault. I let the time lapse. I screwed up.”

December, 2008. Barkley is pulled over for running a stop sign in Scottsdale, Arizona. Barkley told the cops he was in a hurry to get a blowjob from the woman (not his wife) in the passenger seat. He was arrested for DUI, sentenced to ten days in jail, served three.

Now come a few Barkley quotes. This is what being honest sounds like: “Anytime a fan touches you, you have the right to beat the hell out of him.”

“I can be bought. If they paid me enough, I’d work for the Klan.”

“These are my new shoes. They’re good shoes. They won’t make you rich like me, they won’t make you rebound like me, they definitely won’t make you handsome like me. They’ll only make you have shoes like me. That’s it.”

Magic Johnson was one of the first athlete-celebrities to announce he had AIDS. Barkley said, “I’m disappointed in myself that I haven’t felt the same compassion for other people stricken with AIDS that I now feel for Magic.”

Tiger can use some compassion as his world caves in.