A comedian, and magician and a tiger walk into a bar.  “Whassup?” the bartender says to the magician, who answers, “I cheated on my wife.”  The bartender says, “That’s OK, you owned up to it,” and pours the magician a shot.  “How about me,” says the comedian, “I also cheated on my wife, and I also confessed to it.”  The bartender pours him a shot.  The tiger is silent, so the bartender asks, “Why so glum?”  The tiger says, “Just like these guys, I cut around on my wife, and I apologized.”  The bartender pulls a pistol from beneath the counter and shoots the tiger between the eyes.  “Why’d you do that?” the magician and the comedian ask in unison.  “Didn’t you hear the guy?” the bartender says,  “he cheated on his wife.”

This comes out of a weekend discussion between me, my son-in-law, and a brother-in law after ESPN announced Tiger Woods would be returning to the PGA Tour, possibly for the Masters Tournament.  Both of them are scratch golfers, and they were livid.  Tiger had let the sport down.  He’d forsaken his duty as a role model.  Their kids were asking if everyone who plays golf plays around on their wives (hmmm, good question).  I allowed they were being overly judgmental, given that plenty of athletes and entertainers have done far worse and come away with less damage, among them David Letterman and Magic Johnson (sorry, the names “Kobe Bryant” and “John Edwards” still cause sticky keys on my laptop).

Take the case of Johnson, in his man-child prime in 1991 when he called a press conference, wife of eight weeks at his side (they’s been partnered since college), and announced he’d been a serial philanderer and it had caught up with him via a positive HIV test.  He “retired” from the Los Angeles Lakers, partly out of concern for his health, mostly because his fellow hoopsters were afraid he’d scratch them, or cough in their face, or kiss them at half court the way he often smooched old pal Isaiah Thomas before games.  But Magic lost few endorsements, returned to play with buddy-bud Larry Bird on the Olympic “Dream Team” in Barcelona (they hugged, but did not kiss), returned for parts of two seasons with the Lakers.  Today, he’s a wildly successful businessman, a top talking head on TV and very much a role model, if not for kids, for would-be-errant husbands.  The media then and now treated him as an innocent, a victim who, in the words of a book “written” by Magic and Bird, had been “swept up in the Hollywood scene, intoxicated by the beautiful, desirable women who propositioned him in the parking lot before games, in the hotel lobby after games, and in the stands during games.”

David Letterman also proved to have a Teflon penis.  When the boyfriend of one of his conquests tried to blackmail him, Letterman fessed up on his late night television show that he’d been “having sex” with female members of his staff (use of the plural intended).  He apologized obliquely to his wife and fans, then went on to boost his ratings by turning his infidelity into a recurring smarmy shtick.  No one accused him of being a role model gone astray.  Nary a word of condemnation from the National Organization for Women about sexual harassment in the workplace.  No sponsors lost.  In fact, Letterman seems to have actually profited from the incidents (plural again intended).  Not a peep from his wife.  The media celebrated David as a scamp run a bit off kilter, the victim of a dirty little extortion plot.  The story ended last week when his blackmailer plea bargained six months in a minimum security prison, and 1,000 hours of community service. 

The case of Tiger Woods is wholly another thing.  After running his SUV over a fire hydrant in his gated community (somebody left it open?), the best and richest golfer in the history of the world went into hiding as ten or twelve sex partners served themselves up into a media feeding frenzy.  His wife took their kid and fed the country, no comment to the press.  The street story that emerged was that Tiger is a sex addict whose other world unraveled when his wife picked up a spicy phone message and chased him out of the house with a golf club.  More phone messages, racy snapshots and emails were revealed by his addictees.  Major sponsors dumped him, costing him millions. Tiger left the golf tour and checked himself into a rehab center for sex addicts in Mississippi  (I’m not making this up).  He emerged  many weeks later at a press conference with no press in attendance and no questions allowed.  The public divided itself into two camps: PGA touring pros, officials and fans who desperately want him back playing golf because their tour is going in the toilet; and, steadfast critics who believe he’s never owned up to anything.  The media are now hunkered down behind the azaleas at Augusta National waiting for him to make a blooming idiot of himself in early April.

I’m not one with much sympathy for any these guys, remembering my mom’s unwavering admonition, “You made your bed, now lie in it,” and having learned through personal experience that most men are “victims” only of their oversized libidos (and, later in life, their swollen prostates).  But it seems to me there’s a lack of media even-handedness in the coverage of Johnson to Letterman to Woods, and a real ethical question about defining one philanderer as a small boy, another as a naughty adolescent, and the third as a demon sex addict.  Was it because Tiger’s wife wouldn’t “stand by his side” as Magic’s wife Cookie had done?  Would Tiger have been treated differently if he’d emulated Johnson and Letterman and owned up quickly and publicly?  Was it the emails, the pictures and the phone messages?  Is Mississippi a weird place to go for rehab or what?

The answers are probably, “yes, yes, yes, and yes,” but they still don’t add up to preferential treatment for two of these bozos, and damnation for the third.. So I took the questions to my son-in-law and brother-in-law via email this morning.

They answered almost in unison: “You still don’t get it.  He cheated on his wife.”