The hysteria over Tiger Woods is simply wonderful. Compared with Bill Clinton’s tarts, Tiger’s are of slightly better quality, which is not saying much. The prettiest of the lot, Rachel Uchitel, is something else. This is hard for me to admit, but she was at school with my daughter and I had actually noticed her and had said something to my little girl about her. (‘Daddy, stop it.’) Rachel’s best friend was also an operator, a girl by the name of Soshana Lonstein, who managed to land a multimillionaire once she graduated from Nightingale-Bamford, a top girls’ school in the Bagel. While attending school, Soshana was stepping out with a frightful man called Jerry Seinfeld, of TV fame, not the type any self-respecting father would like to see his daughter bring home. In fact, I remember asking the mother of my children whether she planned to turn our daughter into a pole dancer or something. ‘All her friends in that ghastly school look and dress like hookers.’ (Lolly was at L’Aiglon, a wonderful Swiss boarding school, but came back because she was homesick.)
Well, the papers are calling Rachel a socialite, which yet again goes to show how much they know. Uchitel’s grandfather was a sleazy nightclub-owner whom I knew ever so slightly, and her old man overdosed and died a few years ago. Not exactly top-drawer stuff, but better than Miss Chelsea Clinton’s future father-in-law, Ed Mezvinsky, who has just served seven years in a federal lock-up for bank and wire fraud. (Mezvinsky did seven, Jeffrey Epstein did two. I wonder which Clinton buddy is next?) The New York Times failed to report this because it doesn’t fit its agenda, but just imagine if Jenna Bush had become engaged to the son of a crook…
Mind you, people are expressing surprise at Tiger’s antics. What universe are they living in? Billionaire sports stars pick up babes as often as Tony Blair lies, be it tennis, golf, especially basketball. There is hardly a black professional basketball player in the NBA that doesn’t have numerous children with different women. One of them has nine, but pays for only three of them for some strange reason. His case is being reviewed by the courts. Baseball players are mostly whites from poor areas and more often than not marry their high-school sweethearts. The Hispanic ones are livelier, but they, too, prefer marriage to chasing p****. Tiger Woods is known for his swearing and whining, his foul-mouthed tantrums on the course, and his constant claims that he has suffered prejudice because of his race. He’s no hero to those who know him.
Celebrity worship being what it is in America, plus the fact he’s as rich as he is, made it easy for him to pick up ‘socialites’ like Rachel Uchitel and cocktail waitresses like Jaimee Grubbs. Actually, he’s no Don Giovanni. The Don was reckless but he seduced mostly ladies and hard-to-seduce working-class girls, as in the case of Donna Elvira’s maid. Tarts like Tiger’s were not to his liking, and I don’t care what Leporello says about his master having done 1,003 women in Spain. He attempts to rape Donna Anna and somehow he gets away with it. The sympathy of the audience, that is. Everyone is drawn to the Don, from the jilted and obsessed Elvira to Spain’s present female defence minister, Carme Chacón, a die-hard feminist. The Don’s image is not manufactured like Tiger’s; it’s the real McCoy. Yet the Don is a mythical character and Tiger Woods is, well, sort of real. Go figure, as they say in Jupiter Island, where Tiger’s wife beat the crap out of him with a seven iron. I find the wife very attractive but not that sexy. She’s in it for the money, I’m sure, but Swedes are known to get physical when they catch their men in flagrante. I had a great friend, Anne Sophie, a real heartbreaker and looker, who was the daughter of a Swedish ambassador and who stabbed her straying boyfriend 11 times. He lived and she went to jail, and he warned me when I stepped out with her what she was like. She was great, knife or no knife.
But back to the Don. My favourite Dons were Cesare Siepi and Ruggero Raimondi. I have seen the opera many, many times, and at one time I knew every word of Leporello’s aria about how many women his master had seduced. (‘In Turchia novantuna; Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre.’ Of course it was hard to get lucky in Turkey back then.) The Don is dragged down to hell in every production, but he lives and will live for ever. He will always be a great man and hero, whereas Tiger’s good-guy image has begun to unravel.
But not for long. Consumerism, celebrity worship, status-seeking, and the artificial cult of youth will rehabilitate him. This is the world we live in. The NY Times just had a three-page spread featuring one of the world’s most important people: Madonna’s gigolo, Jesus Luz. Another two-page spread featured a slob who sues schools that don’t provide equal sports facilities for women, making him sound like the saint he isn’t, and discreetly reported that the slob had also done hard time for fraud. Tiger will be back because it was not his fault. We are racists and made him feel bad when he was young, and he needed some female TLC.
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