The Last Tiger Woods Question

I've asked myself the same kind of question over the years about a whole series of politicians whose names became punch lines: Clinton, Giuliani, Kilpatrick, Spitzer, Sanford, Edwards. Given what was at risk, given how controlled and accomplished they were in other areas of their lives, given what they surely should have known about the guys caught before they were, I fall back on the question that Jay Leno asked Hugh Grant in 1995:

What the hell were you thinking?

Start the political series with former Sen. Gary Hart, who famously challenged the press corps to follow him -- and was apparently stunned when reporters from The Miami Herald did exactly that. After all, the men's club of political reporters had a long history of closing ranks to ignore politicians screwing around. And never more so than about one of Hart's heroes, John F. Kennedy.

But the rules had changed by that day in 1987, when Hart told the assembled reporters: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead." What happened next killed what had looked like a potentially successful run for the White House. Surely the famous photo of Donna Rice on Hart's lap, taken on the yacht with the you-can't-make-this-up name of "Monkey Business," served as ample warning for all men to heed?

Apparently not.

Woods, let's grant, is not a politician. Most pro athletes have far less to lose than most politicians if they get caught in these transgressions. And it's true that as long as Tiger Woods, golfer, can stay out of criminal court and stick a 5-iron for a easy eagle putt, he'll make a nice living and get paid to endorse any links gear that strikes his fancy.

But Tiger Woods, the carefully managed product, obviously had higher aspirations. An athlete who transcends his sport, race and gender to appeal to pretty much anybody, he's been selling an image at least as much as a set of physical skills.

A measure of the impact these revelations have had can be found in one form of widespread public reaction: The jokes, from the professionals on the nighttime talk shows to the instant yuks generated by regular folks. And for a public figure trying for a serious image, there may be no more damaging experience than being ridiculed. The newest tech has made it easy for anybody to use Tiger as a target.

My favorite example so far in the Woods scandal is the Tiger Woods Slow Jam Remix. (And here's an Original Bonus Joke: He actually had been telling his wife the truth, but in Yiddish. So she thought he told her he was going out for some work on his putts...)

Leave aside his marriage and family, which any cheating spouse puts at risk. Like the politicians, Tiger may have been risking part of his career. And he did it in a particularly dumb fashion. If Tiger took the same approach with his mashie as he did with his mash notes, he'd have never won a tournament.

E-mails? Text messages? Voice mail? Anything digital these days is the modern equivalent of a billboard on Time Square. And to do the dirty with women for whom, it appears, discretion is not a key part of their value set?

Why would he think he'd be able to get away with it? Why did any of those other guys think they could?

I tracked down a few experts about infidelity and asked them just that. Their answers were dishearteningly similar. None of these guys thought they would get caught, the experts agreed, because they weren't thinking.

Here's an anthropologist's take:

"We're talking about a brain system that evolved millions of years ago to drive us to do some of the most important things we do on in our lives," said Helen E. Fisher, research professor of anthropology at Rutgers and the author of several books on the biological and evolutionary basis of love and sex.

She means that "be fruitful and multiply" thing. The drive to sow as many seeds as possible, for some men, overrides the front-brain systems that calculate risk and benefit. And once a guy does it once, and doesn't get caught, that makes the risk look smaller and kills the rational fear of getting caught.

"You've gotten used to it and those brain parts have shut down. They've won for years. After a lot of winning, you figure you'll keep winning. Don't forget how profound the sex drive is," she said.

How about a sociologist's point of view?

"People in lust are irrational. They believe this woman is special, they believe they are special," said Pepper Schwartz, sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and, no kidding, relationship expert at Perfectmatch.com. "They believe they are different, smarter, that they have a love-trust relationship. We know better, but we are not in love/passion, so we can think clearly. And so can they in the cold light of day -- but by then, its too late."

Ruth Houston is a self-made infidelity expert. Once a victim, she turned her pain into a career and started researching the topic. She's the founder of InfidelityAdvice.com and the author of "Is He Cheating on You? 829 Telltale Signs." And she gets quoted a lot by people like me, partly because she seems to make sense.

Even in an era when someone else's peccadillo seems to be exposed every day, many men realize the risk of getting nabbed really isn't as large as one might think, she said. People such as Woods -- or Edwards, Giuliani, et al. -- probably know other men who manage to keep their affairs out of the public eye.

"They are in the company of men who do get away with it. They don't even see it as a risk," she said.

But e-mail? Voice messages? The ever-growing list of others whose families and careers were wrecked?

"They aren't thinking that it is ever going to touch them," she said. "They look at the guy who got caught and say, 'He was stupid.' "

Well, surely this new scandal will put the fear of discovery, if not God, into famous cheating men who have not been outed, right?

"They might be a little bit more cautions for the next, oh, 10 days or so," Houston said. "And then it's back to business as usual."