I Hate Tiger Woods, A Continuing Series

This meeting of the He-Man Tiger Woods Haters Club is now in session.

I hate Tiger Woods. I always have. I used to work in the golf business and it would nauseate me how 25-handicappers would come into the shop with idiot grins on their faces saying, "Didjya see what Tiger did today?" as if he were their long lost son. People bought into the marketing hype, thought they had this personal connection to this arrogant and spoiled golf savant who didn't care two cents about anyone or anything other than his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus, a much better person and a much better golfer. (Yeah that's what I said. Jack played with dignity and grace. And he set his records with 3-piece wound balls and a persimmon driver and forged irons with a sweet spot the size of a shirt button, against Hogan and Watson and Player and Palmer.) I hated the way the media fawned over Woods and gave him a pass on all his bad on-course behavior. In golf, a champion should act like one. It's what sets the sport apart from the others.

The off-course scandals just sealed the deal for me. The bizarre sleazeball behavior confirmed what I suspected all along. He's even a bad tipper, ungenerous, crude, self-absorbed. Tiger Woods was a thorough-going phony and a marketing creation. It's been fun to watch him squirm and fume and twist in the wind. Still he's always ready with an excuse. Tiger Woods has never lost a golf tournament. He's just made mental mistakes or there was something wrong with the greens.

It would tickle me if he never won another major. A whole new generation of young guns is coming along now, golfers who grew up imagining themselves lining a crucial putt to beat him on the eighteenth hole, guys from all over the world, McElroy and Ishikawa and Dustin Johnson, and some of his old whipping boys have closed the gap. Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson, two men with far better character, have rededicated themselves and racheted up their games. The intimidation factor is gone. The stare doesn't have the same chilling effect. Last season Y.E. Yang outdueled him at the PGA. Yesterday a Frenchmen ranked 361st in the world played alongside him and made par after par, unrattled. Woods shot four over on Sunday. A poised Graeme McDowell became the first European to win the U.S. Open in forty years.

Woods gave another rude two-sentence interview to the NBC after the match. The entire experience of losing his marketing empire, his wife and family and his carefully crafted and patently false public image has taught him nothing.

Next month is the Open Championship at Saint Andrews, and he will once again be lauded as the favorite. I'll be rooting against him, cheering every missed putt and profanity and thrown club.