No Driver's Ed for Tiger

It’s Masters Week and I hope Tiger does well. After all, he’s been humiliated, missed his son’s birthday, messed up his marriage (hopefully temporarily) and lost a bunch of money for car dealers, watch makers and people who make razors and such. The sad thing is had he taken a simple course in Drivers Education and kept his eye on the ball, much of this could have been avoided. One of the first things you learn in Drivers Education is the importance of the rear view mirror and had he been looking into that thing he might have been able to avoid the disaster in the form of the nine iron or whatever club she used to help him get out of the Escalade. The questions that loom are, did he trade golf immortality for temporary immorality and what drove him to it in the first place.

It has been estimated that his romp in life’s rough has cost his sponsors billions in lost revenue but if he shoots 68 tomorrow he’ll once again be the darling of the media and back on the fairway of life, capable of commanding huge sums to sell merchandise. It’s the American way but isn’t it interesting that because he can putt and chip well we all think he’s our business? Notice I didn’t say anything about driving.
They used to teach this stuff (Drivers Ed) in schools but they stopped and now we have people who believe the car to be a rolling phone booth. I learned early from a guy named Paul Car…that’s right, I said “Car”, that the automobile is a potential missile on wheels that demands our utmost respect. The rear view mirror, often used to apply makeup in order to make the eyes and lips look larger for today’s late to work, grossly underpaid “supermodel”, is our best defense against surprises like nine irons. And the turn indicator, that foreign object protruding from the steering wheel, and usually used only at the last possible second, can be a valuable information tool when used in a timely manner and not while actually into the turn.

Now I understand that some cars have put the widow wipers on the turn indicator knob and some drivers can’t decide whether to wash the windows or signal for a turn but if it’s not raining this seems like a simple decision. There are those who can apply their face, signal for a turn, wash their windows and text at the same time but they’re probably athletic. Ever been riding down the road, using the cell phone, hung up and then wonder what you passed during your conversation? It’s called acting without thinking, something I’m prone to do around the house and I’ve probably hit more hydrants and trees than most folks. The text message scares me, much as it did Tiger, for one cannot send a text message without taking his eyes off where he should be going and there lies the problem…unless you have Marty Feldman eyes (Young Dr. Frankenstein) and can look two places at one time. Even if you do that one of those places is going to get blurry and in Tiger’s case it was his home life.

Similar to a person with a drinking problem, he just “blacked out” with regard to the family and hit that fateful tree. He took his eye off the ball of life, so to speak. Most text messages are trivial nonsense anyway like, “Hey, sup dawg?” but I’m not surprised Tiger drove into that tree. If you had twenty plus teasers, textin, tweetin, talking and trying to get steer you into the rough (where most balls are lost) a tree would be the least of your worries. Tiger’s going to be ok as soon as he’s convinced he can have just as much fun in the fairway and not lose nearly as many balls. He just spent a little too much time in the “rough”.