Will you now crash your SUV to be like Tiger?

Tiger Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant or tree or both, and this has become, at least as I write this, the most significant news story since the election of Barack Obama. It was certainly a lot more shocking. The most publicly anodyne superstar in the world has caused a 24-7 news commotion that is inappropriately reminiscent of the chaos surrounding OJ Simpson.

The commotion has got even more commotiony because Woods has refused to speak to police (of course, why would he?) and refused to publicly explain his actions. Again, why would he? What in the world makes the average man on the street (or internet) believe he has the right to know anything about anybody else?
A new book called Hellraisers profiles the hard-partying, drunken exploits of the four greatest British/Irish actor-drinkers: Burton, O’Toole, Reed, and Harris. I have not read the book, but a review of it in the New York Times noted that it begins as a kind of swashbuckling adoration of being drunk all the time but descends into a cautionary tale about addiction — none of them could stop drinking, even when their lives depended on it.
Woods is a phenom. Burton, O’Toole, Reed, Harris: they are geniuses (as much as an actor can be a genius). Privately we know nothing of them that they don’t want us to know.
One of the reasons that nobody really cared about the private life of Tiger Woods before is that he was to anodyne stiffs what the above actors were to drunken legends. And we do not care so much about the private lives of drunken legends because, while action-packed, they are predictable.
In the same way that we wanted Oliver Reed to drink himself to death — so that we could retain in our minds the vision of genius we had built around the persona we knew — we needed Tiger Woods to stay boring so that we could pretend to believe that our understanding of him was our link to his abilities — our glimpse of some ounce of greatness that resides within us.
We, because we are worthless excuses for human beings, worship mythologies of men like Woods because it makes us like them without having to have their audacity, and we simply were not prepared to think of Tiger Woods in a car crash at very low speeds, late at night, bleeding from the mouth, and being knocked unconscious.
Think of all the amateur golfers who shoot in the high 80s who, having studied Tiger’s mannerisms so that they may buffoonishly recreate them on courses on which Tiger might shoot 55, are now going to have to make embarrassing late-night blunders involving wives and SUVs in order to keep up.
I for one commend Tiger Woods for his actions. Whatever they may have been. Not because I understand them, or want to understand them, but because he let people down who had pathetically put stock in their faith that he was, completely, the man they expected him to be.