Tilghman suspended, whereas Zoeller was ostracized -- the logic is Fuzzy
Somewhere, Fuzzy Zoeller is wondering to himself why he was lucky enough to catch America when it was in a much less charitable mood.
You remember Zoeller, the glib, funny, accomplished golfer who made the egregious error 11 Masters ago of trying to be funny at Tiger Woods' expense, referring to him as "that little boy," and urging him not to order fried chicken or collard greens at the traditional champions dinner. As reward for his terminal cleverness, Zoeller was buried in the court of public opinion, and in the marketplace, and has never truly recovered.
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| Zoeller should've kept his mouth shut. Or perhaps he should've waited until 2008? (Getty Images) |
So the obvious questions, then, are these: When did we change our mind about racially dodgy remarks made in failed jest? When did we redefine in our own heads the idea of offensive speech? Why was Fuzzy Zoeller found guiltier than Kelly Tilghman?
And maybe there's one more as well. Why did Woods leave Zoeller to twist in the wind by saying nothing while the public slaughtered Zoeller's choice of words, but yet he jumped to Tilghman's defense?
That last one, only Woods can answer, and likely never will. He counted Tilghman as a friend in his statement two weeks ago, but did not feel the same way about Zoeller in 1997, so maybe this is just a case of the Fourth Rule Of Being A Wise Guy -- people you know get a pass for cracking on you that people you don't, don't.
But the rest of it is on us, because the difference between the two remarks is fairly minimal.
Now we don't have a side here. We are not advocating that Tilghman get the chair, or that Zoeller is awarded 11 years of back-dated endorsement money. It's just that America has moved on this issue, and we're not sure when, or why.
We as a society decided somehow that Kelly Tilghman doesn't have to pay the same price that Fuzzy Zoeller did. We decided Tilghman, who was sober and on air doing the job of a professional communicator, gets a free one while Zoeller, who was holding a drink (either his first or only one in a series) and standing on the course after shooting a 78 in the final round of the '97 Masters when he decided to run his yap, get his legs removed.
In other words, we as a society have decided, rightly or wrongly, to stop caring as much about the art of public retribution. And at some point, we may, for our own sanity's sake, want to ask ourselves why.
Maybe we decided with evidence nobody can see that Tilghman didn't mean it while Zoeller did. Maybe attractive 38-year-old women aren't held to the same intellectual rigor than blocky 45-year-old men were back in the day. Maybe the 24/7 news cycle has desensitized us to the spoken outrage. Maybe so many worse forms of behavior have become a norm in the world of sports, making a slip of the tongue not worth the bother. Maybe we're still paying too much attention to football, or tax season, or we are saving our anger for the sorry state of the nation or the politicians who say they can fix it. Maybe we see some nuance between the terms "little boy" and "lynch" that doesn't seem to be easily found if you actually think about it a moment.
And maybe we just don't give a damn any more.
But we probably should decide for ourselves what it is that allows Tilghman to walk when Zoeller didn't, for essentially the same failing. Because the real anomaly here is how America decided to parse a difference between the two remarks when there doesn't seem to have been one. Maybe the difference is in us.
And you may decide for yourselves what kind of social development this is, because frankly, we don't get it. Not for Fuzzy Zoeller's sake, really, or Kelly Tilghman's, but for ours. Somewhere along the way, we changed our mind about inadvertent but racially charged speech, and if nothing else, we should try to find out why.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
