PHILADELPHIA — The saga of Tiger Woods is a classic pop-cultural case of the sexual tables turned — a scenario that is becoming increasingly familiar.
His alleged affairs, text messages and voice mails are, as of this writing, still to be confirmed or authenticated, but they point to the quintessential tale of this age: that of the great man brought low via mobile media.
Tiger, Tiger: Texting is not too bright. Woods has fallen into a messaging ambush of his own making — as did, before him, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Nevada Sen. John Ensign.
Cocktail waitress Jaimee Grubb says she had a 31-month affair with Woods and has provided Us Weekly text messages allegedly from him. She says she has more than 300.
Grubb has also provided a voice mail she says is from Woods. In it, a worried man’s voice says, “Hey, it’s, uh, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favor. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you. … You’ve got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”
Tracy Quan, author of “Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl,” said with some sympathy: “It’s like we’re back in the 19th century: ‘Please! Burn my letters!’ ”
Celebrity gossip Web site TMZ reported Thursday that Elin Nordegren, Woods’ wife, discovered him texting nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel — said to be a Woods’ mistress — shortly before Woods’ now infamous driving accident. Uchitel, now represented by celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, denied the report.
Technology has changed the nature of illicit affairs, leaving one to ponder why people in the public eye would ever commit their passions to cyberspace ever again, in light of what has happened with e-mails and text messages lately.
David Crystal, author of “Language and the Internet,” writes — by e-mail — that “it’s amazing indeed that people can be so naive about e-communication. As I say … slightly tongue in cheek, never send an e-message you wouldn’t be prepared to defend in a court of law!”
Last year Kilpatrick, then Detroit’s mayor, got snarled in a sex scandal when a few of the thousands of messages sent between him and chief of staff Christine Beatty in 2002 and 2003 landed in the lap of the Detroit Free Press.
Kilpatrick apparently was untroubled that he had sent his texts on a city-issued pager, contrary to a city directive. His scandal ended in political downfall, fines and jail time.
There’s an aspect of tragedy to all this. Like Gulliver in Lilliput, the great man — so infatuated, so dumb or so full of hubris it never occurs to him that his every tweet, text and e-mail may be used against him — watches the million silken ropes of the media lasso him and pull him down.
This is not new technology. E-mail is about 27 years old; person-to-person texting, about 16.
Yet smart, powerful, prominent men in amorous situations seem unable to understand the brutal facts. As in “e-mail is forever.” (Even if you melt down your computer, your e-mail is on someone else’s hard drive, too.) As in “text messages and voice mail are not secure.”
Corzine has had many a squirming moment because of 745 pages’ worth of e-mails between himself and former girlfriend and union leader Karla Katz. In May 2008, a judge ordered the e-mails released. They’ve been the subject of a court battle since.
Sanford — now battling the South Carolina Legislature to keep his job and with his wife, Jenny, to keep his marriage — sent delirious, poetic e-mails to his Argentine lover, Maria Belen Chapur: “How in the world this lightning strike snuck up on us I am still not quite sure. … It was all safe. Where we are is not. … I wish I could wish it away.”
He probably wishes it even more now that a South Carolina newspaper has published several of his passionate e-mails.
Ensign has plummeted from grace in Nevada after discovery of his affair with Cindy Hampton, wife of his chief of staff, Doug Hampton. Hampton the Husband intercepted a text message from Ensign on Hampton the Wife’s cell phone. Confronted, the illicit pair swore they’d stop.
Evidently, they didn’t. Months later, using Ensign’s cell phone, Doug Hampton discovered that his wife was still listed under the pseudonym “Aunt Judy.”Ensign is 51. He was in his mid-20s when e-mail went global. Quan says, “He’s too young to be that clueless about texting.”
There seems to be a disconnect between the way we think about intimate communication and the facts of mobile texting. Immediate and quick, texting can seem a just-me-and-you sharing. But again and again, texters’ texts get all over the place.
Quan said: “We want relationships to be based on spontaneity and trust. For example, ‘I trust you to keep our messages private.’ So when we’re in intimate relationships, we tend not to set formal rules of communication.
“Setting rules might be a good idea, but almost nobody ever does it, because that’s robotic and not how relationships work. It’s very unusual for people even to think of that at the beginning of a relationship.”
It was somehow appropriate that Woods’ apology to the world last week was posted on his Web site: “I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means.”
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