The golf at the Masters this weekend was as exciting as hitting a ball into a hole can be, but the morality play starring Tiger Woods was fascinating in more complex ways.
The fallen hero did not achieve redemption with his clubs and came away unsatisfied, saying “I enter events to win–I didn’t get that done,” and now is taking “time off” to “reevaluate this.”
“This” may be simply be the mechanics of his golf game, but a comparison of Woods and the protagonist of the 20th century’s most provocative sports novel and movie suggests something more.
In a New York Times blog, Robert Wright sees “an eerie parallel between Woods and Roy Hobbs, the baseball player at the center of Bernard Malamud’s ‘The Natural,'” who sets out to be “the best there ever was in the game” and is derailed by his appetite for women.
Wright points out the disparity between outcomes in the 1952 novel and 1984 movie starring Robert Redford, which appeared at the start of the era in which Oprah arrived to become such “a showcase for redemption that, when Tiger Woods had his fall, people started counting the days until the seemingly inevitable Oprah cleansing ritual.”