You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will Read Free

which are often larger than the actual salaries for players, especially in sports such as tennis, golf, and the NBA.
    Tiger Woods was not just
some
jock. He wasn’t some median-salary PGA pro hoping to break into the top ten at the Tucson Open. He was
the
jock, perhaps the world’s most recognizable human behind the pope and President Obama.
    My point is this: you can’t take the concept of sexual addiction as it may apply to 90 percent of the world and apply it to Tiger Woods. Call him what you will—unfaithful, deceitful, uncaring—but please don’t say that his decision to have multiple sex partners works the same way it would with the rest of us.
    Remember back to when the story broke and Tiger went into rehab. He not only exited the public stage—he disappeared. He went into such deep seclusion nobody could even get a photo of him. In this age of iPhones and sports blogs and paparazzi and TMZ, when a lot of people would have paid a lot of money for a quick shot of Woods, it was more than a week later when a fuzzy shot of a guy who looked like Tiger—wearing a hoodie andstanding on the porch of a condo-looking place we assume was the rehab center—was published on Radar online.
    More than a week. Who can hide for more than a week? Not even the biggest actor can hide for more than a week.
    Tiger Woods can hide for more than a week.
    That’s power. That’s exclusivity. That’s juice.
    The sports world is different, and Woods was different within that world. He was a one-man subcategory of a small subcategory. Athletes understand this. During the 2010 Winter Olympics,
Time
magazine’s Sean Gregory interviewed an athlete on the morning of Tiger’s famous sex-addict press conference. This athlete, told that Woods hugged a few people after stepping down from the podium, joked about Tiger’s so-called addiction and said of the people he hugged, “They’re like, ‘Yeah, you’re awesome. You go have that sex.’ ”
    That athlete? Lindsey Vonn, who ended up becoming Tiger’s first public relationship in the postaddict phase of his life. It’s interesting that Vonn was married at the time of Tiger’s fall, too. Even she laughed at him. Her words reflected the general feeling among athletes and people who understand the sports world.
    It was a staged apology for a staged problem.
    But I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say I’m just hoping and praying Tiger has been cured of his addiction. I think there’s some evidence that his rehabilitation was successful. The biggest indication came in March of 2012. That’s when Tiger won the Bay Hill tournament, his first win since the sex scandal of 2009.
    Sex
addict.
    Please
.
    Someone get me a glass of water.



Torn in the USA
    I’ve traveled to forty-seven or forty-eight states, settling in only five, and I’m here to tell you there’s a stark difference between visiting a place and sinking some roots, no matter how deep. A home, a lawn, a neighbor—
that’s
how you get to know the heart of a place.
    From a safe distance, maybe while vacationing from the North during another long winter, Tampa probably feels like a reasonably priced Valhalla. It’s got everything you’d want for a quick escape: cheap golf, warm weather, quiet beaches. It’s an affordable paradise.
    From a distance.
    The twenty months I spent living in Tampa felt like twenty years. To me, the draining heat and humidity from May through October made it feel like Libya with an NFL franchise. Or maybe Kenya with a Ruby Tuesday’s. It was crowded with retirees who moved there, drove slowly, complained too much, registered to vote in order to vote No on virtually everything.
    School bonds? No.
    Infrastructure improvements? No.
    A new park? Hell, no.
    I had a running joke with friends who wanted to visit: fly into Atlanta and follow the Waffle Houses south. After living in Las Vegas, Tampa had all the energy of a dying car battery.
    And yet, when I returned there to cover Super Bowl XXXVII,