Woods cheated on his wife, not us

Stones haven't been cast. It has been more like boulders flung ashore by tsunami waves, the ones standing nearly 30 feet high and weighing 1,600 tons.

Nothing brings out moralistic banter like another's failure.

Tiger Woods spoke for 13½ minutes Friday, and we know this because every syllable of every word of every sentence of every paragraph of his prepared statement was dissected the past 24 hours by anyone and everyone with a public platform on which to critique. If you missed it, ESPN should be on its 567th replay any second now.

I suppose that is to be expected a day after some lunatic flies a plane into an Internal Revenue Service building and kills people. Priorities and all.

But the staged drama of Woods' appearance before the world felt like those times when you finally see a movie everyone is talking about and it doesn't elicit the same level of emotion. You shrug your shoulders while walking out of the theater, and others can't understand.

I don't know how many drafts it took for Woods to finish his statement, which was heavy on apology for his marital infidelity. But from the time he began speaking at PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., to the second he departed, not much changed in how I view him, which is to say the guy is still more robot than Gort.

Tiger Woods of today, a flawed and shamed and repentant and still angry man (at least toward those who take pictures for a living), will always own a level of standoffish behavior that for some reason annoys so many. No athlete in history has had more control over any situation that involves his presence, and it will be no different tomorrow or next week or whenever he returns to competitive golf.

Woods even managed to make the toughest and most embarrassing chapter in his lifetime Friday sound like a scripted monologue, and yet whose right is it to decide the level of another's contrition in such a moment? The sanctimonious blabber that comes from talking heads in times like this is pathetic.

I am trying to figure out what questions people outside his wife and two children deserve answers to now, especially after Woods apologized to everyone from his family and friends and fans and sponsors and staff and all the kids, from those educated by his schools in California and Washington to those who idolized him as one of the world's finest athletes. Forgiveness now becomes an individual matter.

He cheated on his wife. He had affairs. He made a laughingstock of the public image he and his team so carefully crafted over the years, one of the flawless character and devoted family man.

If it angers you today that your financial support went toward creating a fraudulent ideal that helped him become so rich and famous, stop buying products he endorses. Ban from your life anything with a Swoosh on it. Change the channel when you see his backswing. Stop supporting the fantasy. It's long gone.

But it's not our business to inquire about how many women and where and how often. It's not anyone's right to pursue angles of this story that are so profoundly personal and private between a husband and wife, it's almost uncomfortable to watch any of it play out.

Woods lived a life most of us could not comprehend and is deservedly paying for it. He bowed to temptations most of us could never confront. So to judge how and to whom he should now make amends is a typical presumptuous reaction from most who will never know such a reality.

Tiger Woods is arguably the greatest golfer to ever walk the planet. By no means has he been thought of as a great guy and now has added a definite level of creep to that persona.

But nothing he said or how it was delivered Friday changed my view of Gort the Golfer. I didn't need to hear others ask questions because I couldn't care less about the answers.

How this story reached this level of importance says a heck of a lot more about us than some famous athlete who didn't have the discipline to keep his pants on.

"Today I want to ask for your help," Woods concluded to the handpicked gallery inside that clubhouse. "I ask you to find room in your heart to one day believe in me again."

I have always believed he is the greatest closer in sports history, that he is the epitome of greatness inside the ropes.

None of that changes, and nor does what I think of him outside them.

Which is, I never give him a second thought because I never thought him worthy of one.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618.