Tiger's Hard Rocky Road to Redemption
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

This scandal may be the biggest stroke of luck for Elin — and the challenge of Tiger's life.

As long as your heart is beating the road to redemption is there to walk. Tiger is no exception. I don’t need to mention Bill and Kobe and Pee-wee for you to know that’s true. The only question is whether Tiger will recognize the road in time to take it.

There’s talk in People magazine that Elin is leaving him. That’s hardly earth-shattering. I expect she will leave him because she really has no choice. But of course that doesn’t have to be the end of that story. Truth is, for Tiger that may be the start of the biggest comeback of life, much bigger than his comeback after last year’s knee surgery.

Even before this scandal broke Elin was one of the planet’s loneliest women. I’m not reporting random gossip, just surmising what is obvious to any thinking person. As the young Swedish wife of the world’s biggest sports celebrity who happens to be a cheating, tournament-winning, privacy-obsessed Blasian, Elin has been cut off from virtually everyone.

To make matters worse, Elin had no career to fall back on for routine and solace to fill the inevitable emotional vaccuum. She was an au pair barely out of her teens when she caught Tiger’s eye. Marriage followed not long after. Essentially, his interest cut short the normal life of a woman of her beauty, education and social position as the daughter of a Swedish power couple. Before she knew it she was the mother of two little ones.

In some important respects, it’s hard to imagine a sadder life than Elin’s — and that was before the scandal broke. She was completely dependent on her husband for validation, emotional succor, her very existence. A woman like that doesn’t have many people to whom she can turn to escape the intense sense of isolation.

That is why to a young woman in Elin’s position, this scandal is a godsend. It is easily the best and most real thing to happen to her in the five years or so since meeting Tiger. It not only turns her into a real woman in the world’s eyes, but it forces her to come to grips with a perspective completely independent of her husband’s

If he has any sense Tiger knows all this. He knows that he could do worse than to make it easy for Elin to walk away forever. The liberation would bring her new life, let her become a person in her own right, an object of sympathy, empathy, even admiration. It would give her a chance to find her own strength and build a real life away from the misery of being perpetually in Tiger Woods’s shadow while being trapped by the second-hand media glare that really belongs only to him.

So Tiger could let her go, with a few hundred million to help her get back on her feet. But if he does, he will have forfeited the biggest match of his life after playing the first round. The world is awed by his golf. How he handles himself and his family through this nightmare will supersede everything the world has ever thought about him based on the flimsy evidence of his conduct on the course. To walk away from this one would turn him into a paper tiger.

Tiger’s only road to redemption is the hard one — the one that entails persuading Elin that despite everything she matters more to him than his money, his fame, even his game. At this point he also has to convince her that he has the empathy and strength of character to give her the space to build a life of her own, a real one completely out of his shadow. That’s a true challenge! It will take all Tiger’s courage to take it up, and all his cunning and tenacity to win.

12/16/2009, 2:25 PM