I have to admit, I don't watch a lot of golf and I'm not that familiar with Tiger Woods oeuvre. It also always seemed to me that especially in his younger days Tiger conducted himself with a lot of poise amidst the discomfort a lot of people clearly experienced when he joined the tour, by which I mean the closet racism of people who saw him put on his first green jacket and couldn't quite put their finger on what just didn't seem right to them about that picture. As a public figure I believe Tiger Woods may have done more in the last twenty years to undermine unconscious racial barriers than anyone except President Obama (and maybe Oprah until she shut down her book club because there were no more books worth reading). So for that reason I've never really wanted to speak ill of Tiger but now I've started to explore Tiger's world through his video game, and from that and the glimpse into his personal life we're getting from the furious media storm surrounding his extramarital affairs and intramarital being chased by a blonde with a big stick affairs, I'm starting to think there's just something a bit off about this guy.
First off, I never realized until I fired up the first hole of Tiger Woods 2010 and watched him head to the first tee box at Banff, Tiger has the cold dead eyes of a killer. Some may interject that this is just the zombie-like state of animated characters on the Wii, a plateau in animation that helped make The Polar Express into the creepiest children's film ever, but I beg to differ. I mean just look at the Vanity Fair cover that he did while trying to hastily remake his image in the wake of losing half of his sponsorships... or as I call it the "Tiger Woods will rape you in the shower" cover. A black man who's just had a run in with the police and admitted to being a sex addict, he does this predatory prison weight room picture that looks like it should be subtitled "Fresh meat in the yard!". For agreeing to that picture, his agent's got to be worse than post-Jordan David Falk ("Don't worry, playing in front of 4,000 people in the Meadowlands will feel just like playing at the Garden, Steph").
Actually it's completely wrong of me to describe that picture that way, since this game has also taught me Tiger Woods could never attack anybody in the shower. Just like Dracula, Tiger's secret weakness is an inability to cross water. Kind of ironic for a guy named after a cat, even though real tigers are much more comfortable in the water. Weird things happen when you get near water in Tiger's game, and water hazards will exert a sort of magical suction that will draw your ball down into them. That may sound like sour grapes, but there are times when you have the wind behind you, you're hitting downhill, the max range of your club way, way past the waterline, and the ball comes off your club at full force going straight (according to Tiger's own swing meter) and your ball will fall short for no discernible reason. You're just supposed to know about the evil gravitic properties of dihydrogen monoxide, I guess. What's really weird is at Pebble Beach the wind can be blowing in from the ocean and it will still suck balls off the course and over the cliffs down to the beach, and this is how I know it's just hydrophobic Tiger messing with everyone: this happens to the other players in match play. When you watch a pro golfer mystifyingly hit three balls out of bounds because they can't compensate for the sudden spike in super-secret seaside suction, it's safe to say we've found a place where the laws of real world physics are subordinate to some secret fear from Tiger's psyche.
One factor working against my "Cats fear water and so does Tiger" theory is the fact that it seems to be constantly raining in this game. It's not just overcast conditions or light drizzle on a few courses, but seriously half the courses have to be played in the pouring rain, with puddles splashing on the greens. It's as though Tiger has never seen Caddy Shack and particularly what happened to the old minister. I always thought of Tiger as this genial guy, but maybe he really does delight in making everyone slog through the rain in soaking wet shoes trying to push putts through an inch of standing water, so nobody will beat any of his records (even just in a video game). This factor of the game does also make sense in light of Tiger's public disagreement with Phil Mickelson about Sawgrass, where Tiger wanted the course rearranged and hole 8 and 17 swapped so as to not have to end the day facing his nemesis: an island green. And you'll notice, when his future ex-wife started getting suspicious she bought herself an island to run away to with the kids.
I suppose I'd have to admit my image of a genial, all for the love of the game Tiger Woods was already shattered by watching how all the players conduct themselves on the course in his game. These people have zero sense of etiquette, doing an elaborate victory dance after every successful hole and even more irritatingly after a poor hole will stomp their feet, swing their clubs around and generally refuse to clear off the green so their opponent (that would be me) can finish the hole. It's really sad that Tiger encourages this behavior in a game that will be played by children just starting out in the game of golf. I wondered why during a tournament I could check the leaderboard, play three holes and then find the guys ahead of me would be stuck on the same hole, but now I realize it just takes them longer because they have to dance and cry and just generally ruin the round for everyone playing with them, and that takes time. Or maybe like Tiger they're so horny they have to sneak off and get some in the tall grass between strokes.
What's really aggravating though is when your 300 lb opponent misses his birdie putt and does a complete body slam onto the surface of the green that makes the entire screen shake... when I'm waiting to putt for the win, how does he not get a penalty for a maneuver that has to have displaced my ball? I imagine in Tiger Woods 2011 a bogey putt will result in my opponent furiously thumping down their club and ripping a divot out of the green right in my lie. I'd turn a blind eye to this foolishness, but the weirdest thing about this game is I can fast-forward through my opponent's shot (the actual game of golf), but I can't skip what happens before and after. This means the first time you're required to enter match play you have to watch in excruciating detail a severely obese man whose sweat-soaked rolls of fat are draping over his shorts take forever to dig in and take an ugly dipping shot, then slam his putter and often his whole body down every time you win a hole. Take it from an overweight guy who plays bad golf, nobody's enjoying watching you sweat and jiggle our way through ten strokes, just get the hell off the green.
Especially because Tiger seemed so determined to make me play with greasy Italians in track suits and sweaty out of breath sumo wrestlers, I decided I needed some eye candy to make this game palatable. In general I feel there are three methodologies for creating video game avatars:
1) your character represents you and should be patterned after you
2) your character represents how you present yourself in the game, so you should create a character that envisions how you intend to play the game
3) you will spend hours staring at your character's ass, so the important thing is your character should be easy on the eyes
For me, option #3 tends to trump the other two in about every game situation, so I play a lot of female characters and get a lot of weird looks for it. In this game, I feel like creating a character or choosing which of the several pro golfers I could play taught me even more about the psyche of Tiger Woods. For one thing, he seems to think the undersides of women's breasts are sticky, and any type of clothing (spandex, windbreaker, untucked polo shirt, anything) will adhere to their bodies like paint. Admittedly I haven't checked in a while, so putting tape on their breasts may just be another thing that women have borrowed from strippers along with shaving their privates (I think the last time I investigated the issue, somebody assured me that was now de rigeur). The other weird thing is finding it's really difficult to scale those down at all and have the upper body and torso line up in any way, or really to match up any combo besides big booty, wasp waist, and a humongous rack. So you kind of have to play a woman with breast implants and these lifeless doll's eyes, and it's kind of creepy, until you realize this is the vision of a guy who had a stable of identical mistresses who all looked like he picked them off an assembly line. And suddenly it all makes sense.
So my character on the PGA tour is a rather... overdesigned woman with cowboy boots, a nose ring, and hair color that changes to match her latest sponsor's gear. And I'm totally hoping the prize for winning the whole game is I get to see her chase Tiger down his driveway brandishing a golf club. Because that guy is weird, man.
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