"Now, you might perhaps feel," wrote Martin Amis well over a decade ago, "that having one girlfriend is happenstance, having two girlfriends is coincidence, but having three girlfriends is enemy action." By this logic, Tiger Woods stands a one-man Stalingrad of faithless chutzpah. How many girlfriends is the golfer up to now? A baker's dozen or so at last count. Though Amis was referring to Philip Larkin, of whom it may be said without disparagement to poetic legacy or overindulgence in political correctness, was a man less than sound on matters of race and far more adept than Woods at keeping his ladies away from one another. This was the same article in which Amis had to call that unreliable mistress, historical context, to his defense by way of explaining Larkin's bigotry: "I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am."
It's a progression of enlightenment that John McWhorter appreciates in the New Republic:
To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn’t anything meaningfully “black” about Woods’ “transgressions,” nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial “narratives” that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to “remind” us of on a regular basis.
Without patting myself on the back, I can admit that I only lately considered the counter-narrative which McWhorter spends the rest of this piece rebutting, confined as it has been to a few black websites and magazines. As far as the mainstream tabloids and shameless non-tabloids ("Click here for all of Slate's Tiger Woods coverage") are concerned, they haven't reported even a trace of innuendo or bad faith on the part of those many "disappointed" fans who'd like to interpret a minor handicap on the green as a nonexistent shortcoming in their hero's private life. Perhaps the sheer quantity of Woods' paramours ("Look, there's another one behind the sofa!") was enough to preempt any malicious mutterings about race and promiscuity in this case. Or maybe athletes as a category--see under Namath and Chamberlain--have cynically yet multiculturally inured us to this form of misbehavior. But McWhorter's point is well taken: tolerance can be measured as much by a negative reaction to vice as it can by a positive reaction to virtue. This is progress, all right. Just don't tell poor Mrs. Woods that....
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