“We are aware of the significance this week to a very special player,” Payne began. “As he ascended in our rankings of the world’s great golfers, he became an example to our kids that success is directly attributable to hard work and effort…. “But as he now says himself, he forgot in the process to remember that with fame and fortune comes responsibility, not invisibility. It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here; it is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids. Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children.”
In case you just arrived from Mars, Tiger Woods in playing in the Masters this week at Augusta National, his first golf tournament in almost five months. Regardless of how one feels about Woods’ transgressions, perhaps the silliest and most offensive spectacle was Masters Chairman Billy Payne deciding it was appropriate to verbally take Woods behind the woodshed. Payne, who’s sat on his pedestal for so long it probably feels to him as if he was to the manor born, clearly was too dense to pick up on the obvious (and not very flattering) symbolism inherent in his diatribe.
Augusta National, still one of the biggest symbols of (White) wealth and (White) privilege in the South, is a place that’s been dragged kicking and screaming into the 1950s. Save for Tiger Woods, African-Americans are still tough to find outside the wait staff or the caddy barn. Women are second-class citizens. White men unquestioningly rule Augusta National, which manages to make subtle racism and not-so-subtle misogyny seem as if has always been and will always be the order of the day.
Never mind the symbolism inherent in Payne, the leader of one of the last bastions of Southern White male privilege, lecturing and hectoring Woods, who not so very long ago wouldn’t have even been allowed on Augusta National’s grounds. Never mind that Payne’s diatribe smacked of a White master talking down to his darkie. No, what offended me most was Payne’s self-ascribed moral authority. Payne is, of course, entitled to his opinion. What he’s not entitled to is to use his position to hold forth as if his opinion is the last word on moral clarity. In another time and place, his words might have carried different meaning. At Augusta National, it was impossible to escape the symbolism of a privileged White plantation owner talking down to his servant.
Almost as disturbing was Payne’s willingness to peddle the canard that athletes are obligated to be role models. If you hold up athletes as role models for your children, your parenting skills are slothful and sorely lacking. This isn’t to say that athletes are uniformly horrible and morally deficient human beings. They are, however, human, subject to the same flaws, temptations, and shortcomings as any of us. For anyone to hold an athlete to a higher standard than you would hold yourself is hypocritical at best, and just plain unfair at worst. Athletes are not role models. Their competitive drive, talent, and financial success do not make them role models. It just means they get more column inches and face time on SportsCenter
Billy Payne may live in the moral equivalent of Pleasantville, where all the men are strong, all the women are going looking, and never is heard a discouraging word. That hardly confers up him the right to pass judgment on Tiger Woods or anyone else. Payne certainly has a right to his opinion, but what he doesn’t possess is the right to be an unadulterated, intolerant ass. Given that Augusta National is, and will likely remain, an anachronistic symbol of racism and sexism, Payne hardly occupies the moral high ground. All he’s really done is to reveal himself to be just another clueless White man who’s convinced himself that wealth and privilege are his birthright.
I’ll tell you what. Once Payne brings Augusta National from the 1950s into the modern world, once he and the Lords of Augusta deign to treat women and African-Americans as equals, THEN perhaps Payne can speak with a modicum of moral authority. No matter what, though, athletes still won’t, and shouldn’t, be role models.
