Dog Bites Tiger

Dog Bites Tiger
by Mark Luedtke

The way reporters have gone after Tiger Woods like sharks after a wounded seal, you'd think that no big-time sports star ever had an affair before Woods. As far as I can tell, nobody cares but reporters. It's a non-story. Stories of the conquests of sports stars are legion, and fans don't care. People love sports stars because they excel at sports, not because of their personal lives. Ray Lewis and his buddies killed two guys, and he's still beloved by football fans. People care about Woods because he's the best golfer in the world, not because he and his wife make a cute couple.

Woods might even attract more fans after this. What man wouldn't want to trade places with him? OK, maybe not Bill Gates, but every man has had the fantasy of being a star athlete worth a billion dollars, having a beautiful wife who takes care of several beautiful, healthy children on his gigantic compound on the beach in Florida while he tours the world playing golf and having sex with the hottest women in the world. For nearly every man, it's just a fantasy. Woods was living the dream before suffering this temporary nightmare. His marriage may be over, but his kids will grow up with a wonderful life and Woods will get back to living the dream.

If this kind of fantasy makes men cads, oh well. We can't help it. That fantasy, or similar ones based on the individual, are the product of billions of years of evolution culminating in a biological imperative for men to spread their seed far and wide to increase the chances of passing on their genetic information to future generations and for the propagation of the species. From the point of view of biology, the more children a man has who grow up and have children of their own, the more successful he is, and the more men who do this, the more successful the species is. That's what our genes have programmed us to do. That's what Woods, star athletes, celebrities, politicians and other wealthy and powerful men do regularly. If the Hollywood hi-jinks on display at grocery store checkouts are any indication, women aren't that different.

Throughout human evolution until the dawn of civilization, humans didn't realize that men played any role in procreation. If a child looked like his or her father, it was considered a gift from the gods. That environment optimized the sexual programming that drives us today. In general, that programming drives us to take care of the children in our immediate family first, historically a struggle as many children died, and the institution of marriage evolved as a reflection of that biological priority. But married men and women are attracted to others because having a child with multiple partners improves the chances of passing genes on to future generations. Humans are especially attracted to have affairs with exotic partners because mixing genetic material between different genetic populations strengthens the population that claims the child because of increased genetic diversity.

Because wealthy people don't struggle to raise the children in their families and they enjoy greater opportunities away from the home, they tend to have more affairs than poor and middle class individuals. The major difference between men and women when it comes to adultery is women have to carry the baby to term and are programmed as the main caregiver while men are programmed to hunt for game and other women, but when wealth frees women from raising children and staying at home, many enjoy affairs too.

What's changed in the modern world is the ease with which men and women can separate and still ensure their children grow up healthy. People are phenomenally more wealthy today than even a century ago. Our social views of marriage haven't caught up with that reality yet. Tiger Woods is the poster child for the biological imperative of reproduction in the modern age, and because his story is remarkably typical, it isn't news.

The bigger story is how badly the press responded to Woods's story. Tiger Woods powers a multi-billion dollar industry that pays the exorbitant salaries of many sports reporters. There's no telling how much he brings to the bottom line of ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The Golf Channel and golf magazines. Yet these very reporters are publicly humiliating their benefactor. And for nothing. The fans don't care.

But Woods cares. He's taken a leave from golf. Writer S.M. Oliva coined the term Tiger bubble and wondered what would happen to these reporters if Woods retired because of it. Another commentator used the term Tiger Woods shrugged to compare his leave of absence with John Galt from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

But I doubt Woods will retire from golf. Tiger can't change his stripes. Woods will prowl again, and telling women he used to be the greatest golfer in the world is not nearly as satisfying as telling them he is the greatest golfer in the world. A has-been, even a billion dollar has-been, is not as attractive as the current best, and I doubt that in the prime of his life, Woods will settle for anything less than being the best again.

And Woods will make the reporters who savaged him pay. Woods was always private, but he'll thoroughly banish from his sphere anybody taking shots at him now. Woods will come back with a vengeance. It will be the biggest golf story since Nicklaus won his twelfth major, and based on who he chooses to cover this story and who he chooses to freeze out, he'll make and break the careers of several sports reporters.