Act like you’ve been there

When word got out about Tiger Woods’ infidelity, people were obviously going to talk about it. Tiger has long been the golden boy of golf, if not all of sport. He won major after major in his signature Sunday red and Nike hat, all the while gratefully acknowledging his family and his fans. It almost seemed too good to be true. Well, turns out it was.

Is it really fair that Tiger has been lambasted to the point of enrolling in sex rehab? If it were any other professional athlete, the story would have gotten two days of coverage on E! and been done with. The real issue is that Tiger was more than just another pro athlete. He was a legitimate American Idol (read: not Taylor Hicks), and in a decade of shams and let-downs, Tiger is the latest in a series of disappointments.

In late 2001 Bethany McLean blew the cover off Enron’s seemingly golden-plated balance sheet, causing one of the most significant financial scandals in U.S. history. Investors lost $11 billion in just one month, causing investor confidence to plummet. They were right to do so: Tyco and WorldCom filed for bankruptcy less than a year later, the latter quickly surpassing Enron as the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

In 2003 the Bush administration was gearing up to launch the war in Iraq. In Bush’s State of the Union address, he proclaimed (surprisingly eloquently for a president notorious for his verbal gaffes) these infamous 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” This single sentence became the crux of the previous administration’s justification for invading Iraq. Former CIA Director George Tenet called the case “a slam dunk.”Turns out, just like Enron, things weren’t exactly as good as they seemed. Seven years and trillions of dollars later, the United States still has not found a single weapon of mass destruction in the now war-ravaged state of Iraq. Mission accomplished, right?

In the mid-2000s the housing market was booming beyond belief. Between 1997 and 2006 the average home price in America increased 142 percent. In 2004 a staggering 69.2 percent of all Americans were homeowners. But once again, the good times didn’t last forever. As a result of handing out mortgages to those who couldn’t repay them, the irresponsibility of firms such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to a loss of 45 percent of the world’s financial wealth, the single largest recession since the Great Depression. Disgraced financier Bernie Madoff just made things worse, allowing his investors to lose $65 billion while he frolicked in Montauk.

I guess the moral of the story is that we should be used to this kind of thing happening. Darrell Royal, former coach of the Texas Longhorns, once said that “When you get to the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.” The same rule applies to disappointment, and we should act like we’ve been through this before – because we have.
 

E-mail: halderfe@indiana.edu