Tiger Woods: One Year Later

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{Crouching Tiger, Hidden Mistress!}

*There is all this Tiger Woods: One Year Later Crap in the Media. “He’s a changed man. He shot a 65 at his Chevron sponsored tournament.” Whatever the case may be, is he really a changed man where it counts socially? The Media wasn’t asking the right questions last year, so this year, I return with a reprint of a critique I wrote when all that nonsense was flooding the airwaves last December. *

Amidst Scandal What Lessons Are We Missing from Tiger Woods’ Learning Center?

Prior to the opening of the ‘Tiger Woods Learning Center’ in Anaheim, Dad Miller’s Golf Course was pretty non-eventful. My uncle, an avid golfer, would tee off there when visiting us from El Paso and regarded it as a ‘piece of shit’ in between chiding me to get a job there as a caddy. Besides that, my only recollections of the golf course were of being a teenager at Savanna High School next door and cutting through (trespassing) its greens on my way home only to be stopped on occasion by some pathetic fool on a golf cart admonishing me and my friends to turn back (time to run cabrones!)

But Dad Miller Golf Course will always be better remembered in the collective consciousness of the city as the place were the sports superstar Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods got his start. As a teenager at Western High School (where he once dated a black girl!) Woods didn’t play ‘la migra’ with golf cart trespassing enforcers, he teed offed and putted to perfection in practice. The hard work paid off – literally- as when the now befallen athlete first ascended to the top of his sport, millions upon millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship from Nike and others was heaped upon him. In due time, after all his riches and successes accumulated, Woods decided to return to Dad Miller Golf Course to ‘give back’ to his community.

Four years ago construction on what was to become the ‘Tiger Woods Learning Center’ began on the corner of Gilbert and Crescent in Anaheim. The youth of the surrounding neighborhood gave it a premature warm welcome by tagging its baseboards to which the construction company responded by installing a bright light and tagging a message of its own: “we are watching you.” The 35,000 square foot facility had its grand opening ceremony on February 10th, 2006. Major figures such as President Bill Clinton and California’s first lady Maria Shriver were on hand for the event. Of course, Woods himself was there and offered the following ‘no shit’ statement on the reason why he was building the center: “This area certainly is not Beverly Hills.”

{The Real Scandal – Tiger Tees Off For Criminal Corporations}

As a physical manifestation of the ‘Tiger Woods Foundation’ — and really, what celebrity doesn’t have some sort of foundation — the center set out to provide state of the art career service training to students from around Anaheim and Orange County. “A lot of the kids I grew up with in high school didn’t have parents at home, or didn’t have the support structure or the advantages that a lot of private schools had,” Woods said in inaugurating his center to ‘bridge the gap.’ The golf superstar cemented – so to speak – his philanthropic asterisk. (Evey celebrity needs one of these so as to not appear engulfed in avarice)

Nearly four years after all the pomp and circumstance, Wood’s over-publicized infidelities, however, have put a dent in the learning center’s funding. His withdrawal from his own annual Chevron World Challenge golf tournament hurt a principle source of income for the facility. Last year, the learning center reported 4.4 million dollars in annual revenues. Will that be the case with Wood’s late hit PR meltdown of 2009? The better question to put forth is, with all of those millions of dollars what exactly does the learning center do for the community?

Most of the time, the facility looks like an empty shell. More teenagers hang outside of the learning center – especially after Savanna High School lets out – than are ever consistently seen inside of it. What career opportunities and lessons has it been inspiring all these years? The center’s father, the Tiger Woods Foundation, lists on its roster of ‘philanthropic partners’ corporations like Bank of America (coming to a taxpayer bailout near you!) AT&T (collaborating with the government to eviscerate your 1st amendment rights) and Chevron (polluting communities from Richmond, California to Ecuador!) These class acts help sponsor fundraisers for the learning center helping it sustain millions of dollars in its coffers.

{Dad Miller Golf Course: Where I Ran From the Golf Cart Migra}

With that being the case, perhaps Orange County’s youth are learning to tee off for a future in the corporate world where scruples are about as important to business practices as marital vows are to Woods. If that is indeed the case, then perhaps they will learn an important lesson the golf superstar has already assimilated in more ways than one; silence. Leftist sports columnist David Zirin says Woods deserves our scrutiny, not for trysts but for his comfort with a corrupt corporate world. Chevron, whose role in Woods’ foundation and learning center has been noted above, also helps solidify dictatorship in Burma in exchange for a lucrative pipeline project.

As Zirin writes, “Ka Hsaw Wa, co-founder and executive director of EarthRights International, wrote in an open letter to Woods, “I myself have spoken to victims of forced labor, rape, and torture on Chevron’s pipeline — if you heard what they said to me, you too would understand how their tragic stories stand in stark contrast to Chevron’s rhetoric about helping communities.” Woods pulled out of the oil corporation’s sponsored golf tournament fund raiser due to his marital problems, not out of good consciousness of what his corporate sponsors were doing around the globe. That makes his rhetoric about helping his community through the learning center as hollow as Chevron’s.