(ThyBlackMan.com) Coming off a promising 2018 PGA Championship in which he resembled a facsimile of his former self, Tiger Woods has continued to participate in golf tournaments after years of health issues that threatened to derail his Hall of Fame career. Over the past decade, Woods has had to deal more about questions regarding his health, career, and his personal life than social issues. In a sports era in which athletes like Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, and Serena Williams have shown to be unafraid to speak out socially and politically, Tiger Woods still stands out for attempting to be “apolitical”. Throughout his impressive career, Tiger Woods has shown a sad inability to even approach any topics related to racial or political issues and there are several comments over the years that display that.
Early in his golf career back in 1997, Tiger Woods displayed an interesting outlook on his own ethnicity during a taping of the Oprah Winfrey Show. He mentioned that he didn’t like being called African-American and said, “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m a ‘Cablinasian’.” This is a term he coined to describe his Caucasian,
black, Indian and Asian background. It is understandable that he wanted to publicly show respect for both his parents ethnic heritage but it also shows a lack of understanding of American history when it comes to how Black people are viewed in an American society where race has been used in the past and present as a social construct to subordinate people of color and view whiteness as superior.
A decade later, Woods had to deal with the controversial comments by golf analyst Kelly Tilghman in 2008. During a television golf broadcast, Tilghman said, while discussing how to defeat Woods, that young players on the PGA Tour should, “lynch him in a back alley,”. Tilghman got suspended by the Golf Channel for those remarks. She had a prior friendship with Woods prior to those comments and Woods allowed his agent to reply instead of addressing the comments himself. Woods’ agent, Mark Steinberg, said, “Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill-intent in her comments.” One year later, Tilghman was an announcer in his video game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010. It is strange that Woods never addressed the unfortunate wording that Tilghman uses to indicate how to stop the black golfer from succeeding on the mostly white PGA Tour.
Recently, Woods has decided not to join the growing list of professional athletes who have criticized Donald Trump and his policies. It is not surprising that anyone would be verbally upset with a U.S. President with a less than stellar approval rating but numerous professional athletes have been critical of Trump during his time in office. After the final round of the Northern Trust golf tournament, Woods was asked questions regarding Donald Trump and said, “Well, he’s the president of the United States. You have to respect the office. No matter who is in the office, you may like, dislike personality or the politics, but we all must respect the office.” Woods has a prior history of playing golf with Trump, both before and after Trump became president, but Woods decided not to verbally support or criticize the things Trump has done or said in favor of a cliche about the office of the U.S. presidency.
It is important to mention the game of golf has been known as being exclusionary towards people of color with a significant class element to it so Tiger Woods has had to deal with some challenges within his sport that LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick did not as they progressed throughout their respective sports. However, Serena Williams and Venus Williams have had to deal with similar challenges of being black in similar settings of their sport and haven’t wavered on speaking out on social issues. Tiger Woods has a sad history of trying to appease everyone when comes to social issues.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
