By Eduardo García Palacios
Is it right to trample on a person’s dignity, to publicly and impudently exhibit a human being in his or her most delicate moments? Would you like images of your relative dying after an accident to be broadcast all over the world? Unfortunately, the current times, which are not running but flying in an uncertain direction, are accustoming us to breakfast, lunch and dinner with a stark display of what human barbarity is capable of perpetrating against fellow human beings. That we are animals is a fact; that we are rational is very, very much in question.
And this exordium is about what the U.S. authorities have done to poor Tiger Woods. And I say poor because, no matter how much wealth the good Eldrick accumulates, what they have done to the best golfer of the last thirty years has no name or shame.
The now star and former star of world golf is already going through enough without having to have his deplorable image exposed by the entire media planet.
Even if his situation had been due to the ingestion of alcoholic beverages, which was not the case according to the tests carried out on him, the image of Tiger and of any other person cannot be dragged through the mud as the American police have done, with the alleged approval of their political authorities.
Who cares to see the former world number one staggering trying to maintain verticality in the early hours of the morning on the road in front of some police officers recording the scene? What do these images contribute to information, already shocking, but pure morbid, the ‘pleasure’ of being able to criticize others, and above all with more zeal for being famous, although unfortunately it is a poor broken toy.
The truth is that we are very hypocritical, starting with the media, who claim to be horrified at any trifle and shamelessly exhibit all kinds of barbarism, for the sake of the sacrosanct freedom of information. When a terrorist slits your father’s throat and the bastards broadcast the video… well, nothing, close-up and without pixelization. When your family is dismembered by a bomb: curtain up, let’s hand out fodder to the viewers.
Hopefully, what happened to Tiger will never happen to him and he will be spared from being shamelessly exhibited as if he were a stinker in the modern Holy Office that the mass media and social networks of the Internet have become.
Moral outbursts aside, the good thing of recent times is, of course, the consecration of Sergio Garcia as the enormous player he has always been and who has emerged supreme at the Augusta Masters.
We are, as he himself recognizes, before a new Sergio, more temperate, with a different mentality, who no longer succumbs to the passing frustrations that come with any competition, and even more so with such an individualistic one as golf.
It is great news for Spaniards that the hero of Borriol and his compatriot Jon Rahm, world number 5 and 10 at the end of May, will measure their immense talents in the Andalucía Valderrama Masters. The big event, in October on the spectacular Costa del Sol course, will be Rahm’s debut as a professional in Spain. A duel between two top 10 Spaniards is something you don’t see every day.
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