By Justin Michael Carter
Chris Rock once joked there isn’t a white person in America who would trade places with him even though he’s rich. Maybe he wasn’t joking after all. How else can you explain why Tiger Woods’ former caddie Stevie Williams continues to display such a delusional sense of entitlement. At the Annual Caddie Awards Dinner, Tiger’s ex caddie said, “My aim was to shove it right up that black arsehole,” when explaining why he celebrated winning his first event so exuberantly after being fired by Woods weeks earlier.
The caddie essentially functions as a golfer’s personal Fonzworth Bentley. He is a man servant who carries a bag and retrieves clubs when told to do so. Tiger’s former Fonzworth made news earlier this year for making disparaging remarks about how he was fired. Apparently all it took was Woods giving him the axe for Stevie Williams to stab a knife right into his back. Maybe he thought Tiger was obligated to employ him for life. Making him a celebrity while putting millions of dollars in his pocket just wasn’t good enough for Stevie.
Stevie Williams issued a hollow apology after he was informed the media had reported the story of his racist remark. He seemed taken aback by how his private comments could have possibly gone public. Reading between the lines of his statement, he might as well have said, “But this is how we always talk about Tiger in private.” Williams was supposed to have been a confidant to Tiger over the years. It is obvious the millions he earned in Tiger’s employ included payment for not simply carrying his bags but for feigning his friendship as well.
The media has been all too happy to oblige the Stevie Williams of the world with a platform to shout down this Black man who spent the last decade dominating a white sport. Every statement made by Tiger’s critics afford the media an opportunity to vicariously attack him from a comfortable distance, like Floyd Mayweather working his jab on a battered sparring partner. Tiger Woods is simply an athlete who cheated on his wife, not exactly a rarity in today’s culture. What Tiger did was wrong but the fervor with which the media has relished his fall from grace has been much worse.
We can see this in the contrast between the reaction to Tiger’s infidelity and Oscar De La Hoya’s recent startling admissions. Both athletes were lionized bastions of their sports, packaged as wholesome figures who could do no wrong. Yet Oscar De La Hoya made more headlines name dropping Tiger than he did for publicly admitting to drunken cocaine binges while dressing up in women’s lingerie and cheating on his wife. In an Academy Award performance befitting his first name, De La Hoya said although what he did was bad, it wasn’t Tiger Woods bad. Oscar’s is one of the most shocking sports stories in recent memory, but the salacious details of his scandal were largely glossed over.
Tiger has somehow become the benchmark used to judge all things immoral in our society. It’s not media’s job to punish Tiger or make him pay a penance for sleeping with dozens of white women. This unhealthy fixation with a Black man’s genitals, obsessing about the white women he sleeps with, and fantasizing about giving him the Abner Louima treatment all adds up to something. It was ridiculous for Clarence Thomas to compare the Anita Hill scandal to a hi tech version of hanging a Black man from a tree. But if media lynchings did exist, Tiger Woods would know exactly what the noose felt like.
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