Three weeks ago, everything was different for Tiger Woods. That’s not that long ago. Twenty-one days ago, he was a billionaire who changed the game of golf forever and did it as a pillar of society.

He was John Galt … if John Galt had infidelity issues. Which, I guess would make him Henry Reardon. Either way, he was better than us.

Some might cringe at the suggestion that anyone is better than anyone else. Don’t cringe. It’s unbecoming. Your face looks vaguely reptilian when you scrunch it up like that. Relax your muscles and realize that we encouraged Woods to be better than us. It’s what he was selling, and seeing as how he’s a billionaire, I’d say we were happy to buy it.

Tiger Woods, in reality, isn’t worse than the other athletes with front page scandals. Kobe Bryant may or may not have raped someone (he definitely fooled around). Mike Tyson had his fair share of lady-problems. Michael Jordan is a gambling addict. Pete Rose too.  Charles Barkley drives recklessly with lady friends. Ray Lewis and O.J. Simpson have both been suspected of murder. Manny Pacquiao has cheated on his wife at least once and is under scrutiny for having recently done it again. Andre Agassi wore a wig. Plaxico Burress wore sweatpants in public. Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Milli-Vanilla … they all lipsynched their songs. That’s pretty bad, no?

Tiger Woods? All he did was treat his wife like Tony Soprano treated Carmela. And that show was on HBO for eight years! People loved it. So why has it only taken three weeks for Woods to go from pillar to pariah? He’s still great at golf, right? Why is everyone leaving? Where’s everyone going? And why?

Tiger Woods sold himself – not his skill – to the public. His ability to hit a golf ball with power and accuracy is why we cared to examine Woods further, sure, but he made his fortune from the public measuring ourselves against him. And just as one can only measure something accurately if it is shorter than the measuring stick, so too was it true that Tiger Woods had to be better than all of us in order to see how we stacked up.

People get upset if you lie about the skills you have. They’ll drop you forever if you lie about the kind of person you are.

No one ever believed Bryant was perfect. He was always cunning and a teensy bit cold. A hard worker, always. But a good man? I dunno. Probably not. Because he never seemed like he cared to be liked. He cared to be respected. Same thing with Jordan or Armstrong. They never wrapped their personal lives in with their profession. The media tried (they always try), but fans know the difference between the media connecting the dots and the athlete doing it for them.

Woods carved out a place for himself in the public eye as a family man and a son who’d learned the lessons taught to him by a loving family and heckuva father. The media didn’t connect those dots. His advertisers did. They packaged it, sent it out and if you were one of the millions who bought it, then this has been a nasty three weeks for you too. Not as bad as Tiger, but still bad. Bad because his connection with his family, the institute of marriage and the lessons handed down through generations of fathers was something that many of us aspire to. Hell, it’s something that many of us achieve. Just like Tiger Woods. I can’t hit a golf ball more than 250 yards, I haven’t been able to dunk in five years and I’m scared of a 97 mph fastball, but I can raise a family. I can learn from my parents and be a real man.

Just like Tiger Woods.

Unless I can’t, just like Tiger Woods. Unless it’s as impossible as sinking a 40-foot putt. Because if John Galt isn’t perfect, then true brilliance must be a myth. And if this ruler isn’t accurate, what does that say about everything I’ve measured with it?

But I promised you a silver lining, didn’t I? A bright side to what has shaken more lives than any athlete should be able.

The bright side here is that Tiger Woods was, and to some, is, a man among men. Someone who meant more than just golf. Maybe by tearing him down, people will learn to stop building guys like him up so high. The word I’m looking for here is skepticism. But a more deeply-rooted skepticism than before.

Those who never found room for sports in their lives will continue to scoff. Let ‘em. Nothing to be done about them. Those who looked to athletes and the games they played as something that could save them … well, they still can, they’re just going to have to be careful now. More aware. Less accepting. So next time, we’ll all pause before selecting our heroes. We’ll pause to decide if we even want to select a hero.

It’s not that the public will slay potential superstars from developing, it’s that we’ll be paying attention to their development. It’ll be a defensive tactic. A way to protect ourselves from more falsehoods. We won’t get fooled again. Greatness on the playing field will always be awarded with accolades. Bet on it.  It’s how we think about these men and women once the exit the playing field that needs to change, because that’s what hurts us.

Had we been told 15 years ago that Tiger Woods was a) going to be the most miraculous golfer of this or, perhaps, any other generation and b) he will demonstroubly cheat on his wife for years with multiple people, how would it have affected the way we look at Tiger Woods today?

Could it be much worse than how things have played out these last three weeks?

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Photos courtesy of Flickr

It’s hard to tell if I’m arguing against the masses or with them on this one. Mostly because as far as the Andre Agassi autobio meth / wig / daddy issues bombshells goes … well, it’s unclear who’s even paying attention.

Once you strip away the people that will buy the book from whence all this hubbub sprang, simply because hubbub sprung from it, it will be interesting to see what repercussions Agassi’s admittances will have. And because the statute of limitations states that Agassi can’t be touched for drug use and lies from over a decade ago, the repercussions will have to come from the court of public opinion.

The question for the public will inevitably be “should we care?”

And this is where it gets interesting.

Martina Navratilova thinks we should care. Thinks Agassi should have a few titles taken away. Thinks he’s a cheater and a liar.

“Shocking,” Navratilova said Thursday. “Not as much shock that he did it as shock he lied about it and didn’t own up to it. He’s up there with Roger Clemens, as far as I’m concerned.”

Way to swing wild there, Tina. Navratilova is one of the most respected athletes in her field and has long been an ambassador to tennis, which is why it’s surprising that she’d take such a hard-line stance on a colleague who very likely has done more good for tennis than she has. Comparing Agassi to Clemens is wrong. Not only has Agassi owned up to his misdeeds, but he did it while being under no pressure to do so. No one made these claims against Agassi. No one sat him in front of a grand jury. No one put him under a microscope.

Navratilova went on to imply that “owning up” to his lies in an autobiography somehow doesn’t count.

“He owned up to it [in the book],” Navratilova said. “but it doesn’t help now.”

Would getting suspended for meth by a tribunal in 1998 have helped? Who would it have helped? How?

Do I condone drug use? Or lying? Or profiting from those lies? Or cheating? No. Not in a vacuum. We’re not in one though. But like it or not, we live in a world full of gray and sometimes yes or no answers just aren’t accurate.

By positioning Roger Clemens alongside Agassi, Navratilova (and the countless others who likely feel the same way she does) marked Agassi a cheater who used drugs to enhance his performance. But c’mon. Stop it. Hyperactivity may be a reaction from meth use, but so is shortness of breath, loss of coordination, dizziness, decreased appetite and numbness. Agassi started 1997 (the year he said he used methamphetamines) ranked No. 8 in the world. Throughout the season he dropped to as low as No. 141.

Worst enhanced performance ever.

So maybe it isn’t the performance enhancement, so much as the lying in 1998 at which the public should aim their negative opinions. Lying isn’t good. In the end, Agassi shouldn’t have done it. He should have taken his lumps. Hell, he might even be more beloved today had he gone through with his suspension publicly. Then again, the public wasn’t as jaded against public scandal 11 years ago as it is now. Maybe it wouldn’t have gone so well. And Navratilova seems not to have taken that last bit into consideration, or not care about the possibility that Agassi’s career seriously risked being finished.

So the ATP tribunal owed Agassi a suspension. But what would they have been suspending him for, really? Cheating? He didn’t cheat. He used a banned substance that hurt him and his performance. For compromising the image of the ATP? He didn’t. He blamed his struggles on a sore wrist and some of the closest people to him were unaware of his drug use.

“Maybe it was me being naïve, but I had no clue,” Brad Gilbert, Agassi’s longtime coach, said in a telephone interview with the New York Times on Friday.

Would the suspension have been for Agassi’s fans who (unknowingly) watched him suffer through a horrific 1997? Well, if we’re looking out for the fans, it should be noted that he would have been suspended in 1998 for his positive test in ’97. By 1998, according to Agassi, he’d quit doing meth and mounted an astounding climb from No. 122 in January to No. 6 in December. The fans? They wouldn’t have seen that.

Agassi was the only victim of his meth use in 1997. Why punish him twice?

Back to an earlier point: There’s plenty of precedent that tennis didn’t owe Agassi a suspension in the first place. Eight cases of positive steroid tests were exonerated in 2003 after a similar-but-stricter tribunal than the one Agassi faced found that none of the players intended to enhance their performance with the substance. Earlier this year the Austrian Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) dismissed the WTA’s Tamira Paszek for illegally re-injecting blood that had been transfused, purified and then put back into her body. She wasn’t aware of its illegality and therefore, NADA exonerated her on the grounds that she didn’t intend to cheat.

No one’s accusing Agassi of using meth with the intention of enhancing his athletic ability.

Then there’s the profit aspect.

It’s possible and, in fact, likely that Agassi lied in 1998 so as not to lose his endorsements. It’s also possible and likely that we’re talking about Agassi’s addiction now because he’s got a book to sell next week. But he didn’t dabble in crank so that he could add to his bank account a decade later.

And if you think he did, then the irrational cynicism from which you suffer is non-refundable. Ain’t no comin’ back now.

Yeah. All this chatter will help push product. Should we hope our favorite celebrities write books filled with old anecdotes that we’ve all heard? If everything in his book is true, I don’t fault him for telling his story.

But that’s coming from someone who believes this to be the first time Agassi came out ahead from any of his past transgressions.

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Photos courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images

What if that same guy put it up for auction and started the bidding at $2 million? You’d probably do the quick math and figure that $2 million divided by 2,500 issues equals $800 per issue, right?

And after you finished scoffing, you’d wonder why such a deal was worth a post here.

Does it change anything that nearly 2,400 of those issues are signed by the people that graced the covers?

Ah. See? I thought that’d get your attention. “But still …” you tell your humble narrator. “Deers, dogs and chicks aren’t really worth $800 each. I can’t imagine how the owner justifies a $2 million asking price.”

You’re a shrewd audience, but I like that. I like that.

See, it’s not just a lifetime’s worth of autographed magazines you could’ve purchased (the auction closed at 11 pm EST today). You’d have paid for a small posse’s lifetime of blood, sweat and hustle. Or maybe just sweat and two parts hustle.

Self-proclaimed “SI King” Scott Smith worked with numerous assistants and inside men with specific connections to people that could procure the king with his prized collection. But the whole lot of his bag men aren’t anything compared to Michelle X.

From the SI King’s team description:

Every great collector should have a good friend like Michelle X. For obvious reasons, I bring my curvy co-worker with me when crashing the best banquets.

Just look at her. Need I say more? When I can’t get Lance Armstrong, she gets two. When Roger Clemens saw her, he crumbled like a little girl and signed five in a row. Patrick Ewing didn’t stand a chance. Michelle’s lined up to do the Heisman, Baseball Assistance Team, Boys Club, College Football HOF, Mets & Yankees Welcome Home Dinners. I’ll be more than happy to lend her out to any collector that ponies up the money! She ain’t cheap and neither is my lender fee! Her services as an aggressive collector are well worth it.

This description reminds me of the high school nerd who falls into money, buys himself a trophy wife and parades her around the 10 year reunion stil trying to beat the bullies of yesteryear. Smith never calls Michelle X a prostitute, but he comes uncomfortably close, doesn’t he?

Lending out aggressive and elegant ladies in exchange for money … sounds pimp-ish to me.

I owned a pair of golf clubs that once belonged to a golfer struck by lightning while on a ninth hole in a Nevada course. But that story ain’t nothing compared to the collection of 2,500 Sports Illustrated magazines signed by 2,400 athletes, athletes’ agents and athletes’ kin.

So, dear readers, the collection is $2 million and the SI King is also offering free shipping.

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Photos courtesy of Scott Smith

How is Miguel Tejada not the most hated player in baseball?

No, seriously. Don’t shrug your shoulders. The guy was named in the Mitchell Report, the document that linked Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds to steroids. He lied to Congress about purchasing HGH. He lied to the Oakland A’s, the Baltimore Orioles and the Houston Astros about how old he was. He does nothing to raise the spirits of the dead Astros clubhouse. He considers Fig Newtons to be cookies (not cake) and leaves the wrappers all over the video room. And now, the New York Times reported Saturday that he was suspected of helping friends on opposing teams by signaling what pitches were coming and allowing batted balls to get past him during the occasional blowout in 2001.

Honestly, if this is all true – hell, if half of it is true – this guy is Gaylord Perry, Pete Rose, Jose Canseco and my grandmother – who still swears she’s 47 – all wrapped into one.

It’s unclear why this article is popping up now, eight years after it allegedly took place and eight years removed from the possibility of Tejada’s actions ever being proven or disproven. This article was written almost a week ago and there’s been no discussion. No outrage. No rebuttal. No backlash. There have been a plethora of villains in baseball from Ty Cobb to Roger Clemens to Milton Bradley, yet Miguel Tejada is never at the forefront of anyone’s ire.

I understand why MLB does nothing, but why the public? He was guilty of buying and using steroids. He was guilty of lying about it. And he was guilty about pretending to be two years younger than he was. In the court of public opinion, if you’re guilty of three crimes and you’re accused of a fourth … man, you’re guilty.

And if that’s how it works (and I bet Bonds will back me up on that it does work this way) then again, I ask: How is Miguel Tejada not the most hated man in baseball?

Even if steroids are not the dark mark the media has made them out to be and no one sees lying about being two years older as a big deal and even if lying to Congress is viewed as harmless as paying for one movie ticket then theater-hopping all afternoon (hasn’t Congress lied to us countless times? And hasn’t the production studio I’m ripping off, ripped me off first when they told me seeing two “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequels would be a good idea?), it still doesn’t explain the passivity with which this allegation is being met.

If there’s any truth to the NY Times article, isn’t this the worst and most basic of all cheats? It’s not cheating near the game like Pete Rose or in preparation of the game like Canseco and the others. Tejada’s cheating happened during the game and against his own team. One would think there would be noise just to disprove something like that, if for no other reason than to avoid confronting the implications.

But no. Nothing.

To be a fan of baseball or any sport you have to believe it’s at least more clean than dirty and you have to hope that it’s possible for the dirt to be expelled.

Perhaps everyone is just waiting for proof of the things submitted in David Waldstein’s article that was released apropos of nothing. Perhaps its conjecturous tone rendered the article irrelevent or unbelievable even among baseball cynics.

Perhaps, but not likely.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr

Why doesn’t anyone care about the Champions Tour? I realize most people could probably go down the PGA Tour Schedule and classify it something like “Tiger, Boring, Tiger, Tiger, Boring, Tiger, Boring, Boring, hey look, Tiger plays in that one too!”

But even among golf fans, the Champions Tour events are largely ignored. Is it because by the time these heavyweight players have been mostly relegated to the “Geezer Tour” fans figure it’s lost some of the excitement and glamour?  I think ChiChi doing the ChaCha over there on the left in his sassy green pants begs to differ. You can’t even make the argument that it’s golf-lite or anything like that, since I seem to recall a certain 60-year-old recently holding his own with the kids for about 98 percent of a major tournament. Not to mention that this Greg Norman guy was close to doing the same last year. (And choked of course, but 1980s Norman choked too, it’s not a sign of aging.)

Champions Tour events are more like a gathering of all the best we’ve seen over the past couple decades. It’s The Beatles’ No. 1’s album. It’s the best of Aerosmith or The Police, except without the remastering. These are the masters. And really, what other sport is lucky enough to have the opportunity to relive history like this, even after Tiger and Phil and a slew of Asian teenagers have swooped in to take their place on the main stage? Imagine how much interest this concept would gather in other sports:

Football Let’s try this for a warm-up exercise. Raise your hand if you hate the Dallas Cowboys. Raise your hand if you hate the Denver Broncos. Ok, hands down. Now raise your hand if you’d like to see the early 90s Cowboys take on the late 90s Broncos. What, there’s still some hands down? Fine, raise your hand if you’d rather see that than watch the Detroit Lions get slaughtered again on Thanksgiving Day.

I thought as much.

Basketball If you were both alive and able to create memories when the Detroit “Bad Boys” had their run over Jordan’s Bulls and the Bulls saw their ultimate retribution come to pass in the following years, consider yourself lucky. Those were great times for the sport. But now we’re a mess of tattoos and a wedding dress, a failed baseball career, a sexual harassment suit (and maybe a couple other interesting lawsuits) later. Someone set up a rematch, same guys, same teams. This has the potential to be the greatest battle since “Bring It On III.”

Hockey Actually this might be a moot point once we get to hockey. Claude Lemieux came back last season? Theo Fleurry this year? I’m pretty sure Chris Chelios died five years ago and continues to shop out his reanimated corpse instead and no one ever noticed. The only difference here is that while it’s fun to see the old favorites strap on the pads and take to the ice again, most have proven that they can’t exactly hang with the young dogs anymore.

Baseball Well…the thing about baseball is that the further we reach back, the more we find out about them dipping into the Sauce. And I’m not talking about liquor. Or Hollandaise. I’m not denying that a meeting of Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Jose Canseco wouldn’t be entertainment, I’m just not sure an actual baseball game would ever break out.

The point is this with the Senior PGA, here’s a group that chooses not to just kick back in their mansions or their vacation homes in the Caribbean when they retire at age 50. This is a group that truly enjoys what they do and still do it pretty damn well. If only we, as spectators, were so lucky in all sports.

Now that the bombshell mildly notable item that Sammy Sosa juiced has soaked into the core of your being, it’s time to start hunting for witches.

If you believe clean players ever existed, where were they in all of this? I’m aware of the brotherhood teams and organizations have, but think of the hundreds of players to go in and out of the league, isn’t it strange that no one but Jose Canseco – the poster child of steroid abuse – had anything to say about it?

Even more strange are the reactions of baseball personalities around the league after a revelation like Sosa’s has been made.

“That’s not that surprising at all,” Houston first baseman Lance Berkman said. “There are just certain guys that you pretty much know without coming out and making an…accusation, but it does not surprise me, not even a little bit.”

“You think the sun’s going to rise in the east tomorrow,” former Cubs announcer Steve Stone replied when asked if he suspected Sosa of steroid abuse. “Nobody really questioned who was doing what and it wasn’t my job as a broadcaster to ever question who did what.”

I’m not suggesting Berkman or Stone or anyone else ought to have talked to the press and made accusations that they couldn’t back up with proof. But these guys were basing their (ultimately correct) hunches on something. And it is that something that Major League Baseball has not sought after.

Also, is Stone’s position acceptable? He’s right that calling out his suspicions of steroid abuse isn’t what he’s paid to do. But if an international affairs news editor sees that the local news editor is printing false information, does he hold his tongue and risk a severe weakening of the overall product (the newspaper) because, hey, local news ain’t my division, man.

Sometimes to do your job right, you have to do more than is expected. Ironically, a bastardized version of this philosophy probably compelled a handful of the steroid users to start using steroids in the first place. This massive wave of silence by everyone makes it appear as if everyone thinks it’s not a very big deal. And if steroid usage in MLB isn’t a very big deal, isn’t that something MLB should concern itself with?

There were 135 players implicated, named in the Mitchell Report, suspended or confessed to having used steroids. The team pictured above – the 2001 Texas Rangers – watched 23 of those PEDestrians waltz on through the Arlington clubhouse. At what point does our suspicious glare stop resting on just the players and start inquiring as to who else on the 1998 Rangers or the 2001 Rangers or the 2003 Rangers knew about their star players? Every major league ball club had at least nine players on that list of 135 in their clubhouse at some point in their career, but why did, say the Houston Astros, the closest neighbors of the Rangers, manage only nine players? (Admittedly four of Houston’s players Ken Caminiti, Miguel Tejada, Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens are big-time names in this scandal, but still…)

The Yankees had 27 of the 135 names in the clubhouse. The Mets? It had 23 of the named players, same as the Rangers. San Diego and Anaheim? They had 21.

So what?

So why haven’t we heard about the organization’s management? It’s more than plausible that the same organization that brought Rafael Palmeiro, Sosa and Tejada together in 2004 and 2005 were aware of something others weren’t. Sure, it could have been a coincidence. The fact that Canseco and Mark McGwire were on the A’s shooting steroids into each other’s butts 15 years before Tejada and Jason Giambi did it for the same team was probably a coincidence. But some of these things are not coincidences.

There are a lot of innocent people keeping their mouths shut. They’ve been keeping their mouths shut for a long time. Make sure you blame them too, right along with Barry Bonds, Bud Selig and Florida pharmacists. It’s easy to plead blind and dumb because it’s hard to disprove.

But take a look at the above picture from 2001. Four of those five guys are on the list of 135. And in 2000, there were two others on that Texas team (Dave Martinez and David Segui) and the year before that? Two others (Juan Gonzalez and Greg Zaun). And what about the year after this picture? Yup. Two more (Ismael Valdez and Todd Greene). That’s a locker room epidemic. And there ain’t no way everyone else in that locker room and in the owner’s box walked blindly through a lineup full of cheaters.