With the red-hot Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium this weekend, and the P.G.A. Championship, the last major golf tournament of the season, playing out in Rochester, New York, sports-loving types will be treated to the spectacle of two great athletic figures, Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods, who are both seeking redemption.
Each has a sound claim on being the best player of his era in his respective sport, and each is chasing a historic record. With six hundred and forty-seven career home runs, A-Rod is just thirteen behind Willie Mays on the all-time list, and if he weren’t weighed down with injuries and a performance-enhancing-drug scandal, he would also be within striking distance of Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds, the all-time leaders. Tiger has fourteen major championships to his name, just four shy of Jack Nicklaus, and in recent months he’s looked something like his old self, winning five tournaments—one of them, just last week, by seven shots.
Nobody can deny the greatness of Tiger or A-Rod. Still, for many fans, I suspect, the sight of them both going at it this weekend will present a tricky but enjoyable dilemma: Which one should they root against the most vehemently? The big, grinning Rodriguez, who is widely regarded as a cheating phony, and who is only being allowed on the field because he has appealed his suspension? Or the surly, unsmiling Woods, whose fall from grace a few years back involved transgressions of a more personal kind, but who has never really regained the support of the public?
Part of the appeal of sports is aesthetic. A-Rod effortlessly hitting an opposite-field line drive, Tiger drawing a 5-iron thirty yards to get to a tucked pin—these are magnificent things to watch. But there’s also another side to following sports, which is more about exorcising demons and transferring resentments onto third parties than appreciating talent and beauty. Sports needs its pantomime villains as well as its heroes, and if the two are combined in one and the same person or team, well, that just makes it more fun to watch, and jeer.
Look at the ratings. When A-Rod returned to the field in Chicago earlier this week, the YES Network had its biggest viewership of the season. And with Tiger competing again, the ratings for golf, which plummeted in his absence, are also recovering strongly. If he challenges for the lead this weekend, CBS will be thrilled. (And Time Warner customers in New York and Los Angeles will be furious. The cable giant has blacked out CBS in those cities over a row about network fees.)
There are few things as cathartic as expectorating a bit of hate. And that’s one reason A-Rod can expect to hear plenty of boos from the Yankees fans, even as many of the folks doing the booing are hoping he fires a couple of rockets into the upper deck to help the Yanks in the wild-card race. It’s perfectly possible that he will. After his poor performances last season and his long injury layoff, most people in baseball thought he was done. But since returning to the dugout in Chicago earlier this week, on the same day he was handed a two-hundred-and-eleven-game suspension, he’s shown some of his old bat speed and menace. “Holy cow, I’m sure surprised,” Don Cooper, the pitching coach of the White Sox, averred. “He looks pretty good.”
So does Tiger. Despite a double-bogey on his last hole Thursday to finish one over par for the round, six behind the leaders, he has the game to win this weekend. In a way, of course, it’s terribly unfair to compare him to A-Rod. Since astonishing the sports world by winning the 1997 Masters Tournament by twelve shots, at the age of twenty-one, Woods has never been accused of systematic cheating—only cruelly decimating his opponents and presenting a false front to the public as an upstanding family man, and a smiling pitchman for corporate America.
Since that visage was stripped away, Tiger has surrounded himself with a small and tight coterie, and focussed relentlessly on his game, which is what he was really all about, anyway. Watching him play is fascinating, but it couldn’t be described as light entertainment. During rounds, the television cameras sometimes catch him cursing when he plays a bad shot. When he brings his kids, Charlie and Sam, to the golf course, he smiles occasionally, but with a few exceptions—Rory McIlroy is one—he rarely talks to, or even acknowledges, his competitors, let alone the fans. After he’s finished playing, he does the mandatory press interviews but makes no effort to disguise the fact he’d rather be somewhere else. Not surprisingly, most golf fans have gravitated to his great rival, Phil Mickelson, who smiles constantly, signs autograph after autograph, and, generally, is a lot more media-friendly and fan-friendly.
So, whom will I be rooting against? Neither of them, actually. A-Rod, all appearances suggest, is a lying, cheating scoundrel. But the Yankees, with their blatant attempts to get out of his huge contract, have somehow managed to turn him into a more sympathetic figure. Since he’s likely to be suspended at the end of the season anyway, why shouldn’t we enjoy his frantic, but ultimately meaningless—that is, P.E.D.-tainted—efforts to catch Bonds, another juicer? As for Tiger, I kind of prefer the sullen but genuine competitor of today to the old model, which was brought to you by A. T. & T. If he wins this weekend, it will seal a remarkable comeback, after he had dropped out of the top fifty players in the world. And that, after all, is what we sports fans really want: compelling stories.
Photograph by Sam Greenwood/Getty.
