Thursday, July 5, 2001
Tiger and Martina suffering from love
By RAY MELICK
Scripps Howard News Service
Tiger Woods, the No. 1 ranked golfer in the world, fails to even
contend in the U.S. Open. Martina Hingis, the No. 1 ranked women's
tennis player in the world, loses in the first round at Wimbledon,
where she was the top seed for arguably the world's most important
tennis tournament. What do these two people have in common?
Love.
Or perhaps a lack thereof.
Just before the U.S. Open, in an interview in TV Guide, Tiger
Woods' father Earl revealed that his son had recently broken up
with his girlfriend, and didn't think the 25-year-old Tiger would
be getting married any time soon.
Meanwhile, the 20-year-old Hingis has been the top-seeded player
in the past eight Grand Slam events and failed to win any of them.
She's admitted that her focus hasn't been completely on tennis
because of the men in her life, having recently broken up with
a quartet of boyfriends that includes professional tennis players
Justin Gimelstob, Julian Alonso, Ivo Heuberger and Magnus Norman.
Then there was the stalking incident, in which Croatian Dubravko
Rajcevic was sending her love letters and calling her and showing
up where ever she happened to be. During the trial, Hingis started
dating the prosecutor in the case, 31-year-old Miami assistant
state's attorney Christopher Calkin.
Both Woods and Hingis are young, attractive, single and rich.
Just the idea of being twenty-something, with money and time and
freedom and desire (if you know what I mean, and I think you do),
is enough to distract even the most focused of world-class athletes.
So you can see the potential for tension.
These young people are dating. Remember what it was like to go
on a date?
For a guy, making the phone call was as nerve-wracking as a 6-foot
putt to win the U.S. Open. For a girl, waiting for the phone call
(do girls still wait for phone calls?) can really mess with your
scheduled practice time.
Then there are the eternal, soul-searching, life-changing questions
like, what to wear. What music to listen to. What to talk about.
What to eat. What wine to order with what meat. What to do after
dinner. How long to stay out. How soon to call back, or whether
to call back at all.
Throw in the fact that you have to be at the driving range to
prepare for the British Open the next morning, or you're going
out to Centre Court at Wimbledon to take on some unknown whose
life's ambition is just to win one round, and no wonder Woods
and Hingis appear to be distracted.
How do you even go about meeting someone you really want to go
out with when you are a Woods or a Hingis? Oh, sure, they can
go the route of picking someone out of the crowd — there
are plenty of those in all sports. But athletes don't establish
long-term relationships with groupies. I'm talking about someone
with whom to start some kind of meaningful relationship.
Can you ever be sure the person you're going out with likes you
for you? After all, Hingis' latest flame, Calkin, reportedly lives
on a $39,500 salary, while Hingis, according to Forbes magazine,
made $11 million last year. No wonder Calkin took time off from
his job to go to England, saying, “I'm willing to spend whatever
money I can get and whatever time I can get away from my work
to be there for her.”
Is that sweet? Or $weet?
Then there is that never-ending controversy over sports and sex.
Remember Burgess Meredith's character in “Rocky”, growling
out that, “Women weaken legs?”
Or was Babe Ruth right in his claim that “It's not the women
that ages you, but the chasing after them.” (OK, I cleaned
that one up a little bit. The Babe was a little more graphic).
Former heavyweight champion Ken Norton said he gave up women for
eight weeks before a fight. Olympic skier Suzy Chafee, on the
other hand, was a proponent of staying “active,” reportedly
saying that, “too much accumulated energy can work against
you.”
It's enough to give a golfer the yips. Or a tennis pro a bad back.
“A wife,” said Earl Woods, “can sometimes be a
deterrent to a good game of golf.”
That's probably true for the weekend golfer. But I can't imagine
the future Mrs. Woods complaining, “What? The British Open
again? You play that every year! It's cold in Scotland. I want
to go to Cancun!”
To quote that brilliant 20th century philosopher, Barbra Streisand,
“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”
We're human beings. We need community. We crave relationships.
In other words, I don't think marriage is such a bad idea. If
nothing else, it eliminates the question about who you're going
home with that night. Or, as Dennis Miller once said, think of
marriage as “a never-ending series of one-night stands.”
And that's one less thing to distract a person from winning the
next U.S. Open — tennis, or golf.
(Contact Ray Melick of the Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama at
http://www.postherald.com.)
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