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A Tiger divided against himself ...

The rumor goes something like this, give or take a few sordid details:

The Great Athlete, flush with success and fame, sees a beautiful woman from across the room at a swanky party. The woman, who recognizes the Great Athlete, is flustered and nervous. But the Great Athlete is confident and full of brass. He approaches, she waits – What will he say? What will she say? He arrives, looks her in the eye, and asks, “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised by this line, even finds it ridiculous, but after all this is a Great Athlete and she’s always wanted to meet him – to bed him – and so she indulges the conversation. After 20 minutes, the Great Athlete gives her a card with a number on it, the number that when called will summon his driver. And with that, the Great Athlete disappears. After the party, she calls the number, and sure enough a driver comes and picks her up and takes her to an apartment building, where she takes the private elevator to the penthouse suite, where on a bed lies the Great Athlete, shirtless. He politely but firmly informs the woman that they are going to have sex, and they do. Quick, business-like sex, the woman will report later: functional and to the point. The next morning the Great Athlete has his driver take the woman back to her home. Tryst complete.

Punchline:

Several months later that same woman is at another party and sees the Great Athlete from across the room and he sees her and walks over with that same confidence and brass, and she smiles this time, less nervous, ready to reminisce about the evening they spent together, ready to rekindle. And what does the Great Athlete say when he arrives? “What are your hopes? What are your dreams?” The woman is surprised but decides to play along; surely he is just being coy. But wouldn’t you know it, after 20 minutes of conversation, the Great Athlete is handing her a card with a number to call that will summon his driver, who, sure enough, at the end of the evening takes the young woman to that same building with that same private elevator that leads to that same penthouse, where – sure as you’re born – the Great Athlete is lying on his bed shirtless. They proceed to make quick, business-like love, and in the morning, the Great Athlete’s driver takes the woman home. At no point does the Great Athlete give any indication that he has any idea the two of them have ever met, much less done this peculiar mating dance – step for step – once before.

Ladies and gentleman, that great athlete: Derek Jeter.

That’s right: The captain of the world champion New York Yankees, the Sports Illustrated 2009 Sportsman of the Year, the man who’s honor and decorum the likes of Michael Jordan and 60 Minutes‘ Ed Bradley have lined up to celebrate. Hell, even  legendary writer Gay Talese once wrote, “[i]n this era of boorish athletes, obnoxious fans, greedy owners and shattered myths, here’s a hero who’s actually polite, and that has to have come from good parenting. You can’t compare him to Joe DiMaggio, for DiMaggio didn’t have bad manners — he had no manners. Where have you gone, man with manners? Here you are, Derek Jeter.”

But then look at the stream of self-affirming moralist rhetoric that was spun in the direction of Tiger Woods this week, post-automobile incident. Those same sportswriters and society pundits who for years have been falling all over themselves to praise Woods’ playing and his work ethic and his character turned on him with the fanaticism of the newly converted when they learned he had cheated on his wife, peppering him with the condemnation, luxuriating in their disappointment, and waiting patiently for the inevitable public apology.

And that might be the lesson that we should take from all of this: Woods and Jeter are both sports starts of gigantic proportions — men being supermen, larger than life, yet excelling at an activity that, in its basic form, extends back to humanity’s primitive days in the caves and that speaks directly to the most basic breeding instincts at the center of our reproductive process. The difference? Tiger tried to deny his place in the world and settle for family life … and the eventual (and perhaps inevitable) fall from grace that so many public alphas have had to endure. Jeter, on the other hand, inoculated himself against the ethical quibbling and criticisms of the mortal chattering class — in this case, the sportsfan blogosphere and celebrity gossipmongers — by simply being that thing that they would all hope to be had they been born with his … talents.

We love Derek Jeter because he acknowledges who he is (a superstar) and what he is (a philanderer) and acts accordingly (Hopes, anyone? Dreams?), while we resent Woods for desiring normality, breaking vows he probably never should have taken in the first place, and apologizing to millions of people he’s never even met, much less wronged, when he got caught. The same way we loved the lecherous, hard-drinking, cocaine-using politician Charlie Wilson and hate mealy-mouthed family man Governor Mark Sanford. The same way we celebrate George Clooney for brazenly taking 52 models a year to his seaside Italian villa and attack Jude Law for furtively cheating on his fiancee with only one nanny. We like our stars brazen and brave, convinced that society’s conventions don’t apply to them and celebrating the fact that they are beyond the need for explanation or apology.

Otherwise, they’d be just like us.

TAGS:charle wilson, david letterman, derek jeter, george clooney, john wayne, Mark Sanford, tiger woods

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