Dear Reader: Is It Time to Look Away?

We weren’t supposed to get used to this.

There’s an undeniably uneasy feeling watching the Tiger you grew up with self-destruct in real time.

Someone who, for innumerable reasons, feels like they’ve been stitched into your life as long as you can remember.

That’s what this weekend felt like to me and, most likely, many of you. This wasn’t just another headline about Tiger Woods. It wasn’t just another alert on your phone or another story moving through the sports roundup. It felt heavier than that. Familiar in a way that’s honestly uncomfortable to admit.

And I think a lot of people felt it, even if they couldn’t quite put it in words.

If you grew up watching Tiger (and, let’s be honest, who didn’t?), you don’t just remember the wins; you remember where you were when they happened.

You remember the red on Sundays. The silence before the last putt on 18. The way your dad or whoever got you into this game would stop mid-conversation just to turn up the TV before a tee shot. You remember trying to recreate that swing in your backyard, convinced that if you got it just right, you could feel a fraction of what he felt standing over a ball. Everything on the line. No fear.

Tiger didn’t just win. He made golf feel bigger than it ever was. In many ways, he was golf for decades.

Which is why moments like this don’t land like normal news. They don’t just pass you by. Not something you scroll on through. They linger a bit. Sit for a while. Feel just a little bit heavier.

Because we’ve already been here. We’ve watched this derailment at least once too often. The unraveling that turned a guy who felt almost mythological into someone painfully, undeniably human.

Whether we want to admit it or not, there was part of all of us that leaned in a little too close to that. Not out of cruelty, necessarily. More out of curiosity. Maybe even disbelief.

How does someone who built an entire career, a legacy, on being formidable keep breaking again and again and again?

But here we are, facing another wave of headlines that come faster, louder, more critical, less forgiving, every time. Even from the website you’re on right now.

Over the weekend, it felt like you couldn’t escape it. Every platform, every outlet, every version of the same story, time stamps, and mug shot, packaged just differently enough to keep you reading. Believe me, I caught myself doing it too. Refreshing. Texting the group chat. Clicking.

That’s the part that stuck with me, though. Because at some point you have to ask yourself – what are we actually doing here?

MyGolfSpy runs a little differently. It always has, and proudly so. And when the photo started making its way into my inbox and on my timeline, it didn’t sit right.

It just didn’t feel necessary. Ever heard the old saying about not “kickin’ ’em when they’re down?” You don’t need to see a man at his lowest to understand that he’s there. You don’t need any more proof to feel the weight of what happened.

At a certain point, it stops being information and starts becoming something else entirely.

Consumption.

That’s what I keep coming back to. When does coverage turn into something … voyeuristic? Something, admittedly, plenty of journalists and social media chairs have all questioned.

When does it stop being about relaying facts and start being about how much of someone’s worst moment we can package and distribute for profit or notoriety?

And maybe that’s the part that’s been sitting with me more than anything else. Because yes, what happened matters. Decisions like that don’t exist in a vacuum. They can hurt people. Change lives in an instant. No doubt, that part is real, and it should be treated that way, no matter who you are.

But at what point does this actually become about accountability?

At what point is the golf industry and the mainstream media grasping at whatever’s left to keep the Tiger phenomenon going? To keep the attention, keep the hunger. Even if it means feeding a beast that will never be satisfied.

When someone reaches the level Tiger did, when they become more than an athlete, should we ever stop seeing them as a “person” first? In theory – no. Empathy shouldn’t just disappear the second someone’s gifts become apparent on the world’s stage.

The reality? It doesn’t really work like that.

Because someone like Tiger doesn’t just exist as a person anymore. He exists as a brand. An entity. As something that carries weight, no matter the context. Something that can be used, abused, and pushed into even the ugliest of spotlights again and again because it still gets a reaction.

Praised to the nth degree and then torn to shreds the moment we get the chance.

And that’s the part that feels a little sick.

It’s not that the story shouldn’t be told, its the way it’s told. You’ve heard the phrase: “Never meet your heroes.” And I get it. I really do. Because if the last 15 years have taught me anything, it’s that the people we build up the highest tend to have the furthest to fall.

But I don’t think this is about meeting your heroes anymore. It’s about what happens after you keep watching them long after the illusion is gone.

Tiger Woods isn’t the version of himself we grew up with. He’s not frozen in 2000, 2008, or even 2019. Neither are we (thankfully, for some of us.)

But at the same time, that’s not unique to him. That’s your cousin Terry, who had the DUI right before Christmas dinner in ’03. Or your best friend’s estranged father, you’ve been hearing about for years but have never met.

I’m not saying this to you as someone who’s an avid Tiger fan. A true defender. There are decisions he’s made, public ones, that changed the way 8-year-old me used to see him. That part is real too.

At the end of the day he’s a man who’s lived an unimaginably huge life, some of it defying belief, some of it clearly difficult and most of it very public, all while desperately seeking privacy.

And yet, we keep watching like he’s supposed to exist exactly as we remember him.

Writing this feels strange in a way I didn’t expect.
For most of my life, I was on the other side: reading the headlines, talking about it with friends.

Now, I’m the one typing it and that changes things. It makes you pause. Makes you ask whether every damning detail needs to be included, every image shown, every angle explored.

In a world that is all about clicks and scandal, at what point do we look away?

Tiger has given more to this game than almost anyone. That doesn’t excuse anything. It certainly doesn’t erase mistakes or headlines. It doesn’t rewrite reality. But it does make moments like this feel, well, different.

More personal. More layered.

So, I keep coming back to the same question: At what point do we look away? Not out of denial or blind loyalty but basic humanity. At what point do we decide we’ve seen enough to understand what’s happening and maybe we don’t need to watch every painful second of it unfold?

The harder question is this: Will we ever? Will you ever? Will I ever?

Because if history has shown us anything, we probably won’t.

In the meantime, we’ll keep reading. Keep clicking, keep writing. Keep trying to reconcile the version of Tiger we grew up with and the version we’re seeing now.

But maybe, that’s the real story here.