A very emotional moment

For me, it all goes back to Marcia Brady. When I finally poured the last of the beer down the drain and made a commitment to start participating a bit more, I replaced the booze with the news. At that time, the actress who played Marcia was on a publicity tour to promote her new book, which, of course, painted a very dark picture about the doings on the set of the Brady Bunch. How, I remember one therapist asking, on camera, how on earth could this be? At first, I naively thought she was asking how this story could be such a big deal. I was wrong. She was asking how the cast of such a wholesome show could turn out to be a bunch of horny party animals. She did not refer to the author of the book by her name, which is Maureen, but by her show name, Marcia. The problem, I realized, was that Marcia Brady was not living up to our image of her, and we were sorely disappointed. We apparently thought the Brady Bunch was a reality series, or a documentary.

Are we really that stupid? I wondered. Why yes, of course we are.

Tiger Woods has a new commercial out, a close-up of his characterless face with the voice of his dead father saying something, I believe, about ‘how you really feel.’ In addition to hitting a new low in poor taste, the commercial isn’t really what it appears to be: the dead father’s voice, apparently, is from a video made of his dead father talking not to Tiger but to Tiger’s mother. And we’re supposed to get misty eyed over this? I couldn’t stop laughing, personally, but that’s me.

In the strangest shift I’ve ever experienced, I actually found myself respecting Tiger Woods after watching that commercial and then listening to the sports drones grunt about it. And here is why: I don’t believe Tiger Woods ever came out and said, explicitly, look at me, I’m a family man, I love my wife and I love our children and I am a family man, family man, I’m a family man. That’s because he didn’t have to, and that’s because we did it for him. I think all Tiger Woods did was to go along with it, and with that kind of cash on the table, who can blame him? Even though there are millions of dollars in invoices, all the marketing team did was assault us with time-tested images of the hero-athlete with an attractive woman and a couple of kids, and we are so there it’s horrifying to me. There’s no need to be explicit about it: we’re so addicted to this mythology that we’re more than happy to fill in the blanks, not only with our brains, or what’s left of them, but with our money as well.

So I was amused this morning to hear the news that Tiger Woods didn’t win the tournament over the weekend. Robin Roberts, who can always be counted on to dumb it down (kind of like Tiger Woods), was practically bouncing in her seat as she proclaimed that “Tiger” isn’t the biggest news coming out of the tournament. Then she said, “It’s a family story.” That’s because the guy who won is married to a woman who is fighting breast cancer. His mother is also fighting – or recently fought – cancer. So he hugged his wife and they embraced after he won the tournament. He’s married, and his wife is fighting breast cancer, and he’s playing for her because he loves her so very, very much, and it’s not the money, really, it’s her. He’s a family guy with values we can all appreciate and maybe shed a tear or two over, because it’s all so sweet. And maybe it really is, but I don’t know that, nor do you, nor do the sports people or the people who for some reason think it’s fun to watch people swing golf clubs. We’re far more interested in the image until, of course, the image crumbles, and then we somehow feel betrayed. Almost as scary as kneejerk patriotism, we prefer to simply turn the controls over to people like Robin Roberts, who during the prolonged shot of the victory embrace, just couldn’t help herself from saying, on our behalf, “It was a very emotional moment.”