Call off the Tiger hunt

However he has behaved, Tiger Woods’s personal life just isn’t our business. Brendan O’Neill on the relentless erosion of the line between public and private

Am I the only person who feels repelled by the naked glee with which Tiger Woods has been and is still being beaten to a pulp — no, not by his golf club-wielding wife, but by the world’s media? Ever since Woods crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home two weeks ago, his private life has been splashed across the front page of every tabloid from Tennessee to Timbuktu. It’s not over for poor Tiger. Earlier this week another clutch of girlfriends — or victims as they’re now portrayed — decided to spill the beans, including a porn star called Holly. His wife is said to have moved out, his mother-in-law is in hospital, after being taken from his Florida home in an ambulance.

But the ‘kiss and tell’ element isn’t the worst of it. Alongside the predictable tabloid sweep for ‘facts’, for the ‘real story’ of sexual indiscretions, there has also been a witch-hunting of Tiger Woods by a motley crew of broadsheet commentators, experts and therapists. They’ve leapt, vampire-like, for Tiger’s jugular, desperately excited by the thought of forcing this famously private individual to embrace the contemporary cult of emotional sluttishness and, in the words of one columnist, to submit himself to ‘the public confessional which fallen celebrities now have to go through’, even though it ‘will be torture’.

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Woods, we’re told, must renounce his privacy-protecting ways (which he adhered to with ‘legendary zeal’, frowned one columnist) and ‘ring Oprah and get on her sofa pronto’. What we are witnessing is the Great Tiger Hunt — the hounding of a man who dared to say: ‘There is an important and deep principle at stake: the right to some simple human measure of privacy.’