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Ask the Professor Q&A
Location: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Reporting: By NORMAN CHAD, aka The Couch Slouch
The Couch Slouch:
Tiger's just one marriage away from being Eldrick
To: Tiger Woods, Future Husband
From: Couch Slouch, Former Husband
Re: Life, Career and Husbandry
Dump her. I mean, you have a chance to rewrite the record books, and you're thinking of getting hitched? To a blonde bombshell from Sweden? Did you see Michelangelo cruising singles bars when he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? No. Because he kept his eye on the prize.
Don't you remember what happened to Roy Hobbs when he ran into the wrong woman in "The Natural?"
In 2003, you hooked up with this Elin Nordegren. In 2003, the winners of golf's majors were Mike Weir, Jim Furyk, Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel. Shaun Micheel! For goodness sakes, the man doesn't even know how to spell either of his names correctly and he's beating you in majors.
Then, in April, you tied for 22nd in the Masters, your worst finish there since you turned pro. You finished behind a 19-year-old amateur, Casey Wittenberg, who I guarantee you is not engaged or married or, if he knows what's good for him, even spoken for.
And it keeps getting worse -- in back-to-back tournaments last month, you had the second-round lead and didn't win. You had won 18 consecutive times in which you had the lead after 36 holes, and now you're spitting out the bit like Smarty Jones coming down the stretch at Belmont?
This week you're going to the U.S. Open, where you have no chance. It's the woman -- sweet girl, nice face, full of personality, but, Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, in the game of life, she's a fairway bunker.
Everyone says your swing is all messed up. They insist you need to start listening again to Butch Harmon and stop listening to Mark O'Meara. Fiddlesticks. Your crooked tee shots have nothing to do with mechanics. The problem is, at the top of your backswing, you're thinking, "Did I leave the cap off the toothpaste again this morning? Elin's going to kill me!"
And now you're engaged?
Trust me, Tiger -- you're just one bad marriage away from being Eldrick.
Like Michael Corleone's bodyguard told him in "The Godfather": "In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns." Or as the late, great Alan King once said: "If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books."
Oh, sure, Jack Nicklaus told you to get married. Yeah, it worked for him, but his wife wasn't showing up in photo spreads on the Internet.
How many marriages work anyway, Tiger? Ozzie and Harriet. That's about it.
Even in a good marriage, you're dead. Anyone hear from David Arquette since he pledged to Courtney Cox? No. The kid had some acting chops, now he's spackling on weekends. And way back when there was the incomparable Grace Kelly, who got married, became a princess or something and never made another movie.
Are you entirely unfamiliar with Henry VIII? He had the tools to be one of the great monarchs of all-time. But he married his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, then wanted to divorce her to marry Anne Boleyn, but the church wouldn't grant him an annulment, then he was finally allowed to marry Anne, then he grew tired of Anne and had her executed for adultery, then he married Jane Seymour, who bore him a son but died in childbirth, so then -- on Thomas Cromwell's insistence -- he married Anne of Cleves, but he couldn't stand her, divorced her in a London minute and had Cromwell beheaded, then he married Catherine Howard, but had her beheaded for infidelity, so then he married Catherine Parr, who somehow survived him.
Check the scorecard, Tiger -- that's six wives, one annulment, one divorce and several trips to the scaffold. And, believe you me, his work and his golf game suffered.