Littlefield: No Privacy For Tiger ... Or Anybody Else

He once was all a man could be upon the golfing course…

A veritable shining knight upon a big, white horse…

The guy who would change everything for golfers of a hue

Less pale than those who’d gone before, and what the man could do

According to his father was to bring about a change

Throughout the world, not just in golf, and though that may sound strange,

It almost seemed believable as he piled up the wins

And brought the game of golf back from the dead…until his sins

Of both commission and omission started mounting up.

He could, from time to time, propel the ball into the cup,

But not as well as he’d once done. Instead he made the news

For cracking up his car and then enduring all the blues

Endured by lots of men who’re caught when witlessly they’ve strayed

Into forbidden pastures. And it isn’t golf that’s played

Within those not-so-leafy bowers. It’s a different game,

But getting caught is getting caught. It is, I guess, the same

For wealthy golfers as for any other straying clown

Who’s where he has no business being when his pants are down.

Then came the injuries that come to athletes, young and not…

The surgeries, attempted comebacks, traffic stops, the lot.

So he who’d been a golfing legend became tabloid fare,

And though the golf continued, no one seemed so much to care

How often he broke par or how much money he acquired…

They wanted pictures of the women he had lately squired

To wherever he’d squired them, and, unhappily, there are

Some photos in which, I am told, the former golfing star

Is not dressed up in golfing garb…is not dressed up at all,

And what had been some slipping is, by now, I guess, a fall.

The moral, as Bob Dylan put it in an early song,

Is that one shouldn’t ever be where one does not belong.

But there’s a further moral, for these days it might be said,

That for the champ and for the chump, man, privacy is dead.