In recent months, the Florida High School Athletic Association tried to pass a new regulation compelling teenage girls who want to play sport to answer invasive questions about their menstrual cycles.
Under the proposed law, any prospective athlete would have to tell the authorities the date of her first period, her most recent, and how many she has had in the previous 12 months.
Opponents got an inevitable Handmaid’s Tale vibe off the whole sinister business as, under governor Ron DeSantis, the state lurches farther and farther to the religious right.
In a place where libraries are stripped of books containing references to racism and teachers banned from saying the word gay, this latest coercion was presumably intended to hinder transgender kids playing sports and to allow local governments to monitor teen pregnancies and, by extension, abortions.
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A public outcry eventually stymied the measure but, as a long-time Florida resident and a regular fixture on the sidelines of games involving Sam, his teenage soccer-playing daughter, Tiger Woods is surely well aware of the period controversy. After all, he’s long since styled himself a very proud #girldad.
Which adds one more layer of crass to the tampon stunt he pulled on Justin Thomas at the Genesis Invitational.
That a middle-aged man went to the trouble of sourcing a feminine hygiene product and then carrying it on to the course just to mock a competitor is somewhere between puerile and pathetic.
[ Tiger Woods apologises for tampon prankOpens in new window ]
Decades have passed since Bobby Knight, feared college basketball coach at Indiana, put sanitary napkins in the lockers of players he believed were “p--sies”. Most sentient beings thought that appalling and him a troglodyte then. What does it say about Woods’ unreconstructed frat boy persona that he still believes this type of stuff to be hilarious now?
“If I offended anybody, it was not the case, it was just friends having fun,” he said, by way of explanation. “As I said, if I offended anybody in any way, shape or form, I’m sorry. It was not intended to be that way. It was just we play pranks on one another all the time and virally I think this did not come across that way, but between us it was – it’s different.”
On Twitter, four-time Olympic sprint champion Michael Johnson pointed out that any apology containing “If I offended anybody” is no apology at all. Woods knows this well.
He’s had to deliver multiple mea culpas in the years since his ex-wife Elin took a nine-iron to his Cadillac when she discovered the extent of his serial infidelity. The more time passes, the less this louche character seems to learn.
The greatest golfer most of us have ever seen routinely behaves like such a boor it is baffling how so many people, especially his gushing golfing peers, continue to hero worship him.
Maybe, like Tiger, some of them also suffer from a syndrome that Tom House, a former baseball star, categorised as “the jock’s itch”, an unfortunate condition causing the athletically gifted to suffer stunted emotional growth and to behave like 13-year-olds for their entire adult lives. Witness Justin Thomas getting caught using a homophobic slur a while back. More juvenile delinquency.
Woods’s own acute case of terminal adolescence hasn’t been helped by the way he’s too often enabled by those in awe of his talent and celebrity.
Unlike any other driver in the same situation, he was never screened for drugs or alcohol after his 2021 crash while going 87mph in a 45mph zone in Los Angeles. A puzzling decision since he’d been to rehab for a prescription drug problem just months earlier and had previously been arrested for a DUI.
He wasn’t tested when he clattered his Escalade into a Florida fire hydrant in 2009 either. Little wonder Johnson described him as “Teflon”. Nothing sticks. Nothing interferes with the relentless attempt at spinning his every misstep into some sort of flawed hero comeback narrative.
Even this past week, American media seemed loath to point out he has previous with feminine hygiene products.
In an Orlando car park in 2007, a pair of reporters from the National Enquirer picked up a tampon hastily discarded during Woods’ sexual encounter with Mindy Lawton, a diner waitress. Enough tawdry evidence for them to persuade the golfer’s camp that they knew about the womanising lifestyle far removed from his squeaky-clean brand then so beloved of blue-chip sponsors.
Nearly two decades after Woods departed Stanford University, Joshua Garnett was a major football player on that same campus. A 6ft5in offensive guard tipping the scales at 300lbs, he went on to a journeyman NFL career during which he lent his celebrity to his sister Rachel’s charity, distributing free tampons and pads to the homeless, and tackling the stigmatisation of periods.
“Football players are thought to be about as manly as it gets,” said Garnett. “So, I’m here to tell you: It’s not unmanly to talk about menstruation.”
Poor old Eldrick never got that memo and it seems the late George Carlin was, as usual, on the money about him during his final stand-up comedy special all those years ago.
Ever before the tabloids exposed the golfing god’s feet of clay, Carlin declared, “F--k Tiger Woods too. There’s another j--k-off I can do without. I’m tired of being told who to admire in this country . . . I’ll choose my own heroes, thank you very much”.
We can all make better choices than Tiger.
