Tiger’s Problem is Plato’s Fault

For some reason we get all excited about a golf pro acting like a flawed human being. In fact, we react the same way when all of our “heroes” show their clay feet. So as the young folks say, “what’s up with that?” Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, started it all 25oo years ago. Now don’t jump to conclusions. Plato knew nothing about golf. But he proposed that he knew a lot about reality. That’s what philosophers do. They claim to know a lot about reality. They haven’t been able to answer their own questions for almost three thousand years. I suspect that their questions are not that important. But I digress. Deeply embedded somewhere in our minds is the concept of perfection and Plato put it there. Not personally of course. He’s had a lot of help in the last two or three millennia. He was the one who is credited with what we now call essentialism. I’ve studied philosophy for many years. I still doesn’t understand it. Take it from me. You don’t want to do a detailed examination of the connections between essentialism and perfection. But in effect, that old Greek thought that there is a perfect version of everything in the universe. And that it existed in essence. And further that our reality is a flawed copy of the essence, which is perfect. By the way, he also thought that women were inferior to men. And that the universe is made up of four basic elements; earth, wind, fire and water. The truth being that I really don’t know if he personally believed those things but quite a few of his contemporaries did. Don’t get impatient. I’m going to tie this all together. So now we have this concept of perfection in Western thinking. I was educated in a Catholic elementary school. We were lucky. We had real life examples of perfection; the Saints. If you will recall, Saints gave up their lives for their beliefs. They endured terrible tortures and died hideous deaths. They were perfect. And the good School Sisters of Notre Dame applied these lessons liberally, especially to boys, more especially to me. I didn’t match up. They knew it. I knew it too. I took these lessons into my adult life and applied them to other “saints”. Of course, these were secular saints. My heroes where musicians and movie stars – and a few brave soldiers like Audy Murphy and John Wayne. I just knew that Angie Dickenson was perfect in every way. But then one day, I met her on an airplane trip to Los Angeles. She was much older than I thought she was. And close up I could see lots of make-up on her face. She was nice enough but I immediately thought, “she’s not perfect”. I don’t know if that was the day that I realized that perfection didn’t exist. At least not in Plato’s terms. But I do know that when a pro golfer screws up in his personal life, I’m not very disappointed. Because regardless of Plato’s philosophy, I never thought that Tiger was perfect. Although once, when I saw him sink a forty-foot putt, I wavered a bit. So to take this thought just a bit further, what about other heroes in our lives? Do we attribute perfection to them? Do we expect a great basketball player to be perfect in every way because he can play a game better than anyone else? Don’t answer that. I really don’t care. I really do care about the possibility that we might carry an ideal of perfection for our children, spouses, parents or friends. And when they inevitably screw-up, we let our disappointment distort our view of who they really are. Now that’s a tragedy; not what Tiger did or didn’t do. He’s a golfer, for heaven’s sake. He’s not a saint. And if he was, the good School Sisters of Notre Dame would have known about it long before anyone else did.