Golf’s colour line

The golfer, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods is back in the news, after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational tournament on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour. This was his first PGA tour victory in 2-1/2 years. In that period of time, Woods has been in the news, not for his golf, but for his personal life. He is not the first successful PGA professional to from time to time have his personal life trump his golf game. John Daly comes to mind. But Daly is white, and Woods is black. The different colour of their skin has resulted in their personal “indiscretions” being treated by completely different standards.

Focus on Tiger Woods – The Issue is Racism

December 11, 2010 (Last in a series of articles, “Reflections on 2010”) • Eldrick “Tiger” Woods might have lost his top spot in golf rankings in 2010, but he kept his place at the top of search engines around the world, coming in, for instance, at seven out of 10 for the year on searches carried out by Yahoo Canada.[1] Of course what drove this was not his golf game. For the first time since 1995, Woods did not win a tournament, let alone a major. The year 2010 saw his record 623-week reign as the world’s number one ranked golfer come to an end. No, what drove interest in Mr. Woods was the publicity generated by the very public break-up with his wife, Elin Nordegren. Now it is not actually news that a celebrity athlete gets married, has a few affairs, and then has marital difficulties. However most do not receive the massive outpouring of media scrutiny experienced by Mr. Woods. But Woods, you see, is black. His wife, and his girlfriends, were white. That combination still touches a raw nerve throughout much of the Global North, particularly in the United States. The extraordinary obsession with the personal life of one golfer is a reflection of deeply held racist ideas, ideas which permeate modern society.