Quote of the Day (John Updike, on a Happy Golfer)

“He began to get pars, as the whitecaps flashed on one side of the links and on the other the wine-red electric commuter trains swiftly glided up to Glasgow and back. This was happiness, on this wasteland between the tracks and the beach, and freedom, of a wild and windy sort." — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), "Farrell's Caddie," originally printed in The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1991, reprinted in Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996)

Quote of the Day (Jason Gay, on Scottie Scheffler’s ‘Superpower’)

“Composure is [defending Masters champion Scottie] Scheffler’s superpower. The Texas Longhorn graduate (major: finance, of course) puts the unflappable in unflappable. Since blasting his way to the top of the sport early last year, Scheffler has been a marvel of consistency.”—Sports columnist Jason Gay, “The Sizzling Snooze of a Golf Star,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 7, 2023

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on Golf, ‘The Great Mystery’)

“Golf is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess, it bestows favors with what would appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination."— British humorist, playwright and lyricist P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), The Heart of a Goof (1926)

Quote of the Day (Dan Jenkins, on How ‘The Devoted Golfer is an Anguished Soul’)

“The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting just as an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow. He knows he has used putters with straight shafts, dull shafts, glass shafts, oak shafts, and Great-uncle Clyde’s World War I saber, which he found in the attic. Attached to these shafts have been putter heads made of large lumps of lead (‘weight makes the ball roll true,’ salesmen explain) and slivers of aluminum (‘lightness makes the ball roll true,’ salesmen explain) as well as every other substance harder than a marshmallow. He knows he has tried 41 different stances, inspired by everyone from the club pro to Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio, and just as many different strokes. Still, he knows he is hopelessly trapped. He can’t putt, and he never will, and the only thing left for him to do is bury his head in the dirt and live the rest of his life like a radish.”—American sportswriter and novelist Dan Jenkins (1928-2019), “Lockwrists and Cage Cases,” Sports Illustrated, July 16, 1962, reprinted in The Dogged Victims of Inexorable Fate: A Love-Hate Celebration of Golfers and Their Game (1970)

Quote of the Day (Ian O’Connor, on Palmer and Nicklaus)

“Palmer had a deep but friendly voice; Nicklaus sounded like someone who'd spent ten minutes sucking helium from a balloon. Palmer hit the ball right to left; Nicklaus hit it left to right. Palmer hit it low; Nicklaus hit it high. Palmer landed balls in ponds and hayfields; Nicklaus landed them on fairways and greens. Palmer had a hacker's cut only a mother could love; Nicklaus enjoyed a user’s-manual swing. Palmer was a stab-and-jab putter; Nicklaus stroked through the ball. Palmer made eye contact with everyone; Nicklaus only made eye contact with the pin. Palmer was prompt for his appointments; Nicklaus was often tardy.”—Ian O’Connor, Arnie and Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf's Greatest Rivalry (2008)

Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus are on the short list of great sports rivals, along with the likes of Russell vs. Chamberlain, Borg vs. McEnroe, and Bird vs. Magic. As demonstrated insightfully by Ian O’Connor (like me, an alum of St. Cecilia, Englewood, NJ) here, the golf legends’ looks, personalities and styles of play made for the kind of contrasts that sportswriters love.

With 18 victories in major tournaments versus seven for his rival, Nicklaus got the better of Palmer over his long career. But there was a reason why Palmer, who died of heart disease over the weekend at age 87, was called “The King.”

There had been great golfers—Jones, Hagen, Snead, Hogan—before Palmer rose to prominence in the late Fifties, and there would be others (Woods) afterward. But none exuded the dash, drama, friendliness, charisma—the sex appeal, if you will—of Palmer. And the lucrative endorsement deals won for him by agent Mark McCormick paved the way that other golfers would gratefully follow.

But what also fascinates me about Palmer is that nickname, “The King,” possessed by another magnetic figure still active when the golfer was starting out in the Fifties: Clark Gable. Like Palmer, the star of Gone With the Wind enjoyed a rivalry, made up in equal parts of friendship, admiration and envy, with another male, an up-and-coming actor at their studio, MGM: Spencer Tracy.

Like Nicklaus, Tracy used a steely concentration to vault to the top of his profession. And, like the golfer, he earned more honors for his work, winning two Best Oscar Oscars and nine nominations, versus one Oscar and three nominations for Gable. But Tracy and, at the start of his career, Nicklaus were burly men who could not match Gable and Palmer in physical attractiveness or, for that matter, natural crowd-pleasing exuberance. (In the case of Palmer, there was also pull-out-all-the-stops style, memorably encapsulated in the 1973 book that expressed his "philosophy of golf": Go for Broke. Who doesn't love a come-from-behind, thrilling finisher?)

For their part, Gable and Palmer wished they had the laser focus on their craft that helped Tracy and Nicklaus adapt to almost any situation on film sets or on the green.

By the time of their deaths in the 1960s, Gable and Tracy, each secure in his own achievement, viewed the other with considerable respect. So did Palmer and Nicklaus as they became senior citizens. This week, the Web site of “The Golden Bear” prominently featured a photo of the two men smiling and hugging. The caption underneath noted graciously about Palmer: “He was the king of our sport and always will be.”

This Day in Golf History (Legend of Walter Hagen Begins With U.S. Open)

August 21, 1914—With a one-stroke victory over amateur Charles Evans Jr. at the U.S. Open, 21-year-old Walter Hagen started on the path that would make him what many consider America’s first professional golfer, as well as one of the premiere figures in the “Golden Age of Sports” in the 1920s.

Fifteen years ago, while vacationing in Savannah, I was lucky enough to watch location shooting for The Legend of Bagger Vance. Seeing Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron perform, directed by Robert Redford, is an experience that I, as a film fan, will not soon forget.

The movie itself was, given Redford’s track record, a keen disappointment. But it did intrigue me with its depiction of the rivalry between cool, gentlemanly Bobby Jones—whom I already knew about—and the bon vivant Hagen—whom I knew nothing to speak of. Having researched the latter’s life for this post, I now think Redford might have been better off making a jaunty biopic about him rather than the pedestrian adaptation of the Steven Pressfield novel.

A June article in The New York Times by Karen Crouse noted that Hagen was, in his heyday, as famous as Babe Ruth. He did not dominate his sport as thoroughly as The Sultan of Swat had (remember that, at the latter's retirement, no other major leaguer had even half his career home run total). But it might be said that he transformed the golfer's life on and off the links as thoroughly as Ruth did on the baseball diamond.

Just as the “The Babe” ushered in the longball with his Bunyanesque blasts, so “The Haig” facilitated the rise of a new type of golfer with his pioneering 1919 decision not just merely to accept the occasional payment for playing, but to pursue his fortune full-time in exhibitions and tournaments. Just as 1914 saw Ruth’s debut with the Boston Red Sox, so that same year witnessed Hagen’s breakthrough to the front rank of his sport with his U.S. Open win at Chicago's Midlothian Country Club. Just as Ruth was sidelined for much of 1925 with a mysterious “bellyache heard round the world,” so Hagen had to overcome a ferocious case of food poisoning just before his U.S. Open victory.

Each man had a flair for the dramatic: Ruth with his Buddha belly, preposterously heavy 40-ounce-plus bats and swing so savage that it was said to be more entertaining to watch him strike out than for other batters to hit homers; and Hagen, confessing that he “set up shots the way a movie director sets up scenes”—rushing to the first hole mere minutes before his scheduled start, in a wrinkled tux and dancing pumps, as if at an all-night party, and never overly concerned when one of his shots landed in a rough, because he knew he could clobber “that little white ball when the chips were down.”

And both men’s membership among the athletic elite (each an original member of their sport’s Hall of Fame) validated for millions the promise of social mobility and democratization in their contests. Growing up in decidedly modest circumstances, they earned fortunes—and unashamedly enjoyed every penny of it. ("I don't want to be a millionaire,” Hagen admitted. “I just want to live like one.")

The differences between the two were just as fascinating:

*Ruth’s father was a bartender; Hagen’s, a blacksmith.

*Perhaps because of these work environments, the youthful Hagen tended to be fun-loving, while Ruth was positively feral, necessitating his commitment at age seven to St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore (where his life was, famously, turned around by the school’s 6 ft.-6-in. disciplinarian, Brother Matthias).

*While each man thought seriously about becoming a baseball pitcher, the ambidextrous Hagen put aside that dream when a member of the Country Club of Rochester paid his way to the U.S. Open, while Ruth, of course, after several successful seasons on the mound, became a legendary outfielder. (Early in his career, he also discovered the joy of golf—though Ruth was about as good on the links as Hagen was on the diamond.)

*While the adult Ruth really was wild, Hagen’s image was far closer to Dean Martin’s: a carousing one, to be sure, but shrewdly inflated to create a bankable persona.  “It pleased the public to think I lived the easy, carefree life, the playboy of golf,” Hagen wrote in his autobiography, The Walter Hagen Story (1956). “Frankly, I was happy to support both those illusions since I was making money out of the showmanship.” That persona could also lull into a false sense of security unready rivals, who simply could not believe that someone who cared so little about appearance or schedules—and who found himself in one difficulty after another—could extricate himself from a mess of his own making. How could anyone be so low and succeed?

That’s how some snooty country-club members, put out by the notion of a former caddy and golf professional at the Country Club of Rochester—someone whose job was giving lessons, repairing clubs, and selling clubs, balls, and tees, for heaven’s sake—felt when they told Hagen that he and his fellow golf pros weren't welcome in their clubhouses. Not bothered in the slightest, Hagen simply rolled up in a Rolls-Royce, sipping champagne. “Sir Walter” had created his own athletic aristocracy.

Hagen ended up third among the all-time leaders in winning majors (11, behind Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods). But—again like Ruth—his importance transcended the sport. Ruth might have shown, with the help of licensing specialist Christy Walsh, how an athlete—even ones like himself with gargantuan appetites—could put aside enough money for retirement. (See my prior post on this.) Hagen’s shrewd decision, however, was even more imitated: investing in golf clubs bearing his name and design.

The two men also served, in effect, as international ambassadors for their sports. Ruth and the rest of the New York Yankees engaged in a hugely publicized barnstorming tour of Japan in 1934. For his part, Hagen took to playing throughout the South Pacific, the Far East, Africa, and Europe, when his exhibitions in the states did not earn as large purses in the Great Depression.

I wrote, toward the start of this post, about my preference for a Hagen biopic over Bagger Vance. But, in truth, the spirit of Hagen, if not the facts of his life, were contained in another golf film, Ron Shelton’s infinitely superior Tin Cup. Like Hagen, Kevin Costner’s Roy McEvoy is a raffish, small-time golf pro with big-time ambitions. Like Hagen, his “I’m having a ball,” go-for-broke spirit contrasts sharply with a far more conservative field, but also confirms the promise of the U.S. Open—“not just the biggest golf tournament in the world, the most democratic,” he marvels.

Unlike McEvoy, Hagen won not just hearts of the fans and a woman (or, in the latter case, women plural), but also the tournament and the money. But I guess some endings are still too amazing even for Hollywood to believe.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘Gatsby' Golfer Jordan Baker)

“Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

I never got around to writing about the latest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece when it was in the theaters. But did you think I’d pass up the chance to discuss it now that it’s on Blu-ray? Not a chance, old sport. 

Actually, I saw the film in its opening weekend—that’s how eager I was to see how Baz  Luhrmann, with his famously flamboyant visual style, treated what many (myself very much included) consider The Great American Novel. The Australian director’s past work—especially Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge—offered enough clues about how big his many risks can pay off, and how often they can descend into preposterous bombast.

I’ll end the suspense for you immediately, Faithful Reader: this was a sadly misguided adaptation, even though, as with the director’s prior work, it has many good things. On the plus side: Joel Edgerton, as Daisy Buchanan’s womanizing, old-money husband, Tom: buff, bullying, ignorant, insecure—a portrait well within the novelist’s conception of the character. On the minus side, the film’s perverse framing device: Nick Carraway writing and narrating his account of the title character from a sanitarium, where he is being treated for acute alcoholism.

(The novel not only had no such scenes, but not even an implication that this outsider had fallen victim to the same excesses as the era he chronicled. The device, of course, is a nod to Fitzgerald’s own physical and soul sickness, with even the name of the institution—Perkins—an allusion to his legendary Scribner’s editor, Max.)

Now, in the comfort of my home, I could listen to Luhrmann and his collaborators try to justify themselves. Alternatively, I could examine at length where they went wrong. But having opted, with regret, to fork over $4 more to watch their film in 3D, I’m not going to waste my time as well as money. Instead, I thought I would concentrate on one aspect of the movie: its treatment of golfer Jordan Baker. She provides a way to understand both Fitzgerald’s preoccupations and Luhrmann’s faulty understanding of them.

Filmmakers don’t seem to know what to make of Jordan, either physically or psychologically. Elliott Nugent’s 1949 version, starring the egregiously cast Alan Ladd in the title role, ended with Jordan (played by Ruth Hussey, who probably would have been better as Daisy) married to Nick. The 1974 version starring Robert Redford featured as Jordan the former model (and future James Bond girl) Lois Chiles, who thought that her relationship with Robert Evans would land her the role of Daisy (her subsequent flat line readings reveal why the latter possibility would have been even more disastrous for that film than the finished product was.) This time, Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce have eliminated any hint at all of romance between the female golfer and Nick. One change to the novel is as misbegotten as the other.

One of the things that supposedly makes Gatsby unfilmable is Nick’s passivity, an observer rather than actor. His relationship with Jordan, in the novel, goes some way towards refuting that notion.

But the affair does not simply give Nick something to do when he is not reintroducing Gatsby and Daisy, and witnessing the course of their second time around. No, the Nick-Jordan affair serves as a counterpart to their friends.

From first to last, Gatsby is in thrall to his ecstatic vision of Daisy, leaving him not only a prisoner of love but a prisoner of illusion. On the other hand, Nick’s eye, even when it first catches of Jordan, notices something vaguely off-putting about her. Her shoulders are thrown back “like a young cadet” (echoing his wish, after returning from World War I, that the world could stand at “a sort of moral attention forever”). He enjoys looking at her, he admits, but by the third adjective of his description of her “wan, charming, discontented” face, the sense of a dying fall hangs over every letter in the passage. In fact, it colors the reader’s view of her throughout the rest of the book.

Daisy is soft, girlish, flirty, even with her cousin Nick, a 1920s example of an evergreen type: the Southern belle, used to getting her way around men. None of that for Jordan. Hers is a “hard, jaunty body,” almost androgynous, signaling a new type of woman (or, at least, one noticed for the first time) in the Roaring Twenties: “fast.” (Indeed, even her name is a compound of two car models of the time.)

In a time that allowed American women greater freedom than ever before, Jordan equals in intelligence virtually any man she comes in contact with—and certainly Tom Buchanan, whose boorishness provides her (and Fitzgerald) with some of the novel’s slyest satiric passages.

But all that intelligence might not be enough. Immediately, on first acquaintance, Nick vaguely recalls hearing about her somewhere. It’s only later that he figures out where: in the papers, and the subsequent rumors that she was “incurably dishonest.” She avoids “clever, shrewd men” because they might figure out that she is not genuine.

The Great Gatsby is so densely packed with colors, symbols and allusions that it’s easy to overlook Fitzgerald’s use of sports as a vehicle to suggest encroaching corruption in everyday life in America. As a Princeton undergrad, he had tried out for the football team; his school’s football and hockey star, Hobey Baker, became his beau ideal of an athlete of enormous personal and athletic grace (as I described in a prior post); and 20 years later, down on his luck in Hollywood, he continued to follow the fortunes of his alma mater on the gridiron. (He appears to have based Jordan on Edith Cummings, a Chicago socialite who parlayed her golf skills and beauty into a reputation as "The Fairway Flapper"--and the first appearance of a female athlete on the cover of Time Magazine.)

Fitzgerald was the type of person, then, who should have been predisposed to think of the Roaring Twenties—the era of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, and Red Grange—as the so-called “Golden Age of Sports.” But perhaps this worship of athletes only raised his antenna about anything that could corrode the purity of sports.

And so, his great novel includes a rumor about Meyer Wolfsheim (widely believed to be based on gangster Arnold Rothstein) helping to “throw” the 1919 World Series; polo star Tom Buchanan using his “cruel” body to dominate his wife and mistress; and Jordan’s cheating to posit that not even sports, a realm where grace and dedication can shine, is beyond the moral malaise overtaking all other aspects of American life.

“It takes two to make an accident,” Jordan tells Nick in the quarrel that precipitates their breakup, as she tries to deflect some of the responsibility for the end of the relationship. The remark weighs especially heavily coming after the traffic accident that, in effect, seals Gatsby’s doom.

But both parties are not necessarily equally at fault in such matters, and certainly not in the one that kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. It is Daisy, not Gatsby, driving the vehicle that runs over Myrtle, yet Tom takes control of Daisy for good (and camouflages the evidence of his affair from Myrtle’s cuckolded, heartsick, not deranged husband) by claiming that Gatsby was behind the wheel.

Jordan’s silent complicity with the Buchanans is yet another signal that, despite their differences in temperament, she shares their poverty of values. (An earlier hint came in her first scene, when she turns to Nick and remarks, snobbishly, "You live in West Egg.”) In the end, the “incurably dishonest” female golfer is not that different from the two “careless people” who earn Nick’s disapproval.

(The image accompanying this post shows Elizabeth Debick, the actress playing Jordan Baker in the Baz Luhrmann adaptation. The director got Jordan's look fine--which makes it all the more astonishing that he got her function in the novel so wrong.)

Song Lyric of the Day (“Nine,” With Words for Mrs. Woods to Fling at Tiger)

“You grabbed for everything, my friend
But don't you see that in the end
There will be nothing left of me.”—“Take It All,” from the musical Nine, lyrics and music by Maury Weston, sung in the film by philandering director Guido’s wife Luisa (played by Marion Cotillard)

Over the last month, following his overnight SUV crash outside his home—and his admitted marital “transgressions”—many labels are being applied to Tiger Woods that had never occurred to anybody before this year, notably “lecher,” “cad,” and “dog.”

At minimum, the world’s greatest golfer has fallen to “the Hugh Grant syndrome” (i.e., tomcatting around with an inferior woman when his significant other, by universal agreement, is nothing to sneeze at). He might even be a sex addict, as none other than Dr. Drew has speculated.

All in all, the angry response of Luisa above to her husband’s adultery applies nicely here. No matter how much money Tiger makes on the tour now, the departure of his wife and children will leave him spiritually empty. Tiger, who goes crazy on the links when he hears the slightest interruption, is going to have to get used to some of the most ferocious insults ever to come an athlete’s way.

But it takes flights of fancy, hours of free-association on the psychiatrist’s couch—okay, lunacy—to liken the golfer to Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay in epitomizing this past decade’s hucksterism. For that, we have none other than New York Times columnist Frank Rich to thank. Surprise, surprise!

I am mildly amused by media outlets that add political and public-affairs coverage to the portfolio of staffers whose education and prior job experience have prepared them for everything but that: the likes of Mike Lupica, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh. Sure, the magic of the Internet has allowed anyone, no matter how limited their expertise, to comment on anything under the sun, and yes, this is, as they say, a free country. It’s just that you’d expect major organs of the mainstream media, when they’re under severe financial pressure, to think twice about throwing their money around so haphazardly.

Yet the Times has seen fit to give a large portion of its op-ed page to Rich, who had been previously known as a theater critic--perhaps believing, like James Carville, that politics is merely show business for ugly people.

I agree with most of the commentary related to Woods’ philandering. Wife Elin Nordegren (in the accompanying post) is certainly entitled to unleash her attorneys on her horndog hubby in divorce court (though first, given just how much he’s fooled around, she’ll probably want to go to a doctor—and drag him along—to make sure he hasn’t contracted a sexually transmitted disease). I daresay that if she ever shot him, the best prosecutors in the land might find it difficult to gain a guilty verdict from any jury with women on it. (You can almost hear the song from another Rob Marshall movie musical, Chicago: “They Had It Coming.”)

But Rich has gotten himself into a serious moral lather over Woods’ affair(s). Such high dudgeon is a real head-scratcher for longtime readers of his column, as he previously only concerned himself with matters of the flesh when miscreants in its thrall were hypocrites (i.e., conservatives and/or Republicans).

The op-ed columnist has long been tolerated by the Times because he serves red meat to its largely liberal-leaning readers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not on principle against roasting right-wingers myself (see this prior post on the GOP intransigence on health care). But unlike Rich, I like to vary my ideological diet. (Lunatics appear on both ends of the ideological fringe—and anyway, why unnecessarily narrow my targets or deprive myself of much-needed belly laughs, no matter their source?)

Moreover, if you’re going to wield the ideological cleaver, you’d better have your eye firmly on your quarry and not miss when you slash. Unfortunately, the former “Butcher of Broadway” doesn’t bring the same precision to this task as he did to dissecting high-priced musicals years ago.

All kinds of problems exist in this piece, starting with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Tiger Woods, Person of the Year.” (A play, of course, on Time Magazine’s venerable tradition.) David Quigg of the Huffington Post demolishes Rich’s argument until not a brick is standing, making the following points:

* In claiming that Tiger’s “con” might be “more typical of our time” than 9/11, Rich ignores the fact that the latter event is not “typical” (otherwise, why would the Times columnist be disputing the notion that it was “the day that changed everything”?). Like fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman (who suggested something similar in 2002), Rich is wedded to the bizarre and obscene notion that the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans are less crucial to an understanding of this past decade than business wrongdoing.

* Rich’s column assumes that Tiger became fabulously wealthy by being a family man. Nonsense—he did so, Quigg notes matter-of-factly and correctly, by being “really, really, really good at playing a game that lots of Americans spend lots of time, effort, and money striving to play even slightly well."

* Quigg has lots of fun with Rich’s superficial research into Accenture, one of Tiger’s corporate sponsors. The columnist merely quoted from the firm’s Web site when he could have found far more interesting facts on Wikipedia--a highly superficial (and sometimes suspect) source, for sure, but better than what he found. (I’ll go a step further: haven’t Rich and the Times editors heard of Nexis? And for all the effort the paper has made in securing research assistants for their columnists, couldn’t they at least have found one who found more material than a company Web site?)

For all his fine work in taking Rich down a peg or two, however, even Quigg missed some points. The main one is this: Tiger’s deceit, no matter how distasteful or despicable, was designed to fool one person only: his wife. Lay, Madoff, and their ilk concocted schemes to delude government regulators and fleece thousands of investors, many of whom lost their life savings. Tiger revealed nothing more than his own emotional bankruptcy; the financial scammers made millions of dollars disappear like smoke.

Let’s look at other figures—members of both political parties--who have committed marital transgressions. We’ll then judge if Tiger was guilty of the same kind of moral (or legal) outrageousness:

* Governor Mark Sanford went incommunicado for a South American jaunt to his "soul mate," leaving aides totally confused about how to reach him in case of an emergency in South Carolina. Did Tiger? No.

* Former Presidential candidate John Edwards had an affair behind the back of a wife who had just experienced a cancer scare. Did Tiger? No.

* Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told his wife—still in the hospital recovering from a cancer operation, mind you—that he was leaving her for another woman. Did Tiger? No.

* Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy tried to appoint his male lover--a man with minimal, if any, qualifications--to the highest national-security post in the state after 9/11. When the news broke, he told his wife Dina that at the mortifying press conference they were about to endure, she'd have to put on a stoic face, "like Jackie Kennedy." Did Tiger? No.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger, while still a movie star, became what Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau termed “the Gropenator” by fondling underlings on film sets, enjoying the fact that Hollywood’s #1 box-office draw of the time could get anyone fired who objected. Did Tiger do this? No.

* Eliot Spitzer, only months after signing into law some of the nation’s most stringent penalties against johns, himself patronized high-priced call girls. Did Tiger do so while governing a state? No.

* Nev. Senator John Ensign not only had an affair with the wife of an aide, but had his parents pay off the aide and violated lobbying laws by meeting with the cuckolded employee’s new clients. Did Tiger do this? No.

* Bill Clinton hit on an employee while he was in the White House. Has Tiger hit on an employee? No.

* Senator Edward Kennedy had a young woman die in his car when it drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick. Has Tiger had anyone die under such unusual circumstances? No.

It takes a mind such as Rich’s—i.e., one used to cheap moral equivalence—to equate Woods’ real, repeated sins against his wife with the gigantic wrongdoing that ruined philanthropic activities supported by Madoff, let alone the violations of public and/or private trusts represented by the above figures.

The only action that Woods could have perpetrated that might have begun to rise to the level suggested by Rich would be if the golfer used steroids. That would have involved cheating everyone competing with him on the tour, as well as all the professional golfers who preceded him whose records would have fallen by the wayside as a result. And even that would not have the sheer ripple effect created by fraud in a huge public company. And so far, nobody has come forward to accuse him of such use.

Tiger can be blamed for much, but—unless he decides to press charges against his estranged wife for assaulting him (which doesn’t look likely at this juncture)—his wrongdoing involves nothing more than the problems of two people in (or out) of love. His infidelities do nothing to rob Rich, you, me, or anyone else of our hard-earned money. To claim otherwise makes a travesty of a newspaper that has long claimed to stand for the finest in American journalism.

Like Nine's Guido, Tiger has tried to take it all, but now he's paying the price. Frank Rich has tried to claim it all, and continued columns like this will make him pay a price, too: becoming the laughingstock of the Paper of Record's op-ed pages.