When Woods appears, media and fanatics will still be waiting

Do you happen to be one of those guys with a feeling of moral superiority over Tiger Woods today because you don't cheat on the bride?

Here's a bulletin, pal: You fit with the vast majority of America's faithful adult males.

You are bulging at the waist. Or you are losing your hair. Or you are living one paycheck to the next. Or you hit a golf ball farther sideways than forward. Or it's all of the above.

You are like the rest of us. You have been as faithful as a puppy dog, and when your temptation has come from Susan Boyle look-alikes, why not?

Now, if you had biceps fighting to escape extremely fashionable golf shirts, and hats carrying your personal logo to cover a slightly receding hairline, and were hauling in more money than any other athlete in the world, and played the international game of golf better than anyone in history, and had frisky and gorgeous young women throwing themselves at you, as well as the wherewithal to fly such a lass to Australia to help with your relaxation during a tournament, and you still remained completely true to the wife or fiancée, it would be much easier to be impressed with your high moral standards.

I think much less of Tiger Woods than I did a few days ago, but not because he has been exposed as a philanderer.

There was no surprise in that, since with all the assets mentioned above to attract very fetching members of the female gender, the assumption here was that Tiger was getting around -- since dang near all celebrity hunks do get around.

Woods blamed his absence on injuries suffered in his Escalade's tangle with a fire hydrant and then a tree, but a few scratches wouldn't mess up his swing any more than Hank Haney already has.

No, the golfer who has been a competitor beyond all others on the course has turned cowardly at the prospect of facing the media and the hecklers in the wake of the revelations that even the beautiful Elin Nordegren -- the mother of his two children -- could not keep this big cat from straying.

So what does Tiger expect ... that the media and the galleries will let this go away if he makes his 2010 debut as planned for the end-of-January event at Torrey Pines in San Diego?

What he's done is give the media nine weeks to find more lady friends and the loudmouths in the gallery to come up with more creative taunts.

Woods also lost standing in the macho department with his pleading voicemail to mistress Jaimee Grubbs to remove the personal greeting from her cell phone.

The wording was high-brow, but at its essence the statement was pure Tiger. There was a tepid attempt to take responsibility for the scandal, and yet he succeeded in turning the statement into a screed against an invasion of his privacy.

He has been the face of golf since turning pro 13 years ago, and you can count on one hand the number of times that Woods has explained a subpar round by admitting that he played lousy golf. Ninety percent of the time it's putts that lipped out or bad bounces.

Tiger's enormous defense mechanism carried over to Wednesday's statement that included: "For the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives."

Ah, Tiger, you hit the fire hydrant at 2:25 a.m., not anyone from TMZ or US Weekly or even the venerable National Enquirer.

I was in attendance when Tiger won his first Masters as a pro by 12 strokes in 1997, and when he crushed the U.S. Open field by 15 strokes at Pebble Beach in 2000. These performances gave me a fanatical belief that, within his sport, this was the greatest athlete of my lifetime -- beyond Gretzky in hockey, well beyond Jordan in basketball.