Is it okay to throw stones at Tiger?

I’m sure that by now you’re probably sick of listening to people talk about Tiger Woods and his harem of Barbie-doll mistresses. Well, that’s too bad, because I’ve got something to say on the subject and this is my column, so you’ll just have to suffer a little bit longer.

It seems that whenever a celebrity gets caught with his pants down, everyone wants to be the first to pronounce judgment and cast a few stones in his direction. I guess it makes us feel good to see the rich and powerful fall on their faces, especially when they do things that we, personally, would never ever do.

Considering the demographic that my writing appeals to, I am confident that most of the men reading this column have never cheated on their wives or girlfriends. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s because my male readers tend to have high moral character or because they tend to be relatively undesirable to the opposite sex.

Either way, the men who are reading this probably feel okay about looking down on a philanderer like Tiger, safe from the perch of the moral high ground. But is that a fair, or wise, attitude, to have?

A study I recall reading about earlier this year might suggest that it is not. The study was designed to measure how our confidence (or overconfidence) about how well we are able to resist temptation relates to our ability to actually resist temptation when we are faced with it.

The results were interesting. People who had just finished eating a big meal, for instance, were likely to significantly overestimate their ability to turn down a chance to eat one of their favorite foods at a later time when they weren’t so full. On the other hand, people who were hungry at the time they predicted their capacity to turn down a tasty snack at a later time had a more realistic attitude about their own willpower.

How does the experiment apply to Tiger Woods and our judgmental attitudes towards his indiscretions? Well, it’s been said that you shouldn’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. So let’s try and put ourselves in Tiger’s golf spikes for a minute.

Tiger is one of the richest, most famous, and most powerful men in the world. I don’t consider myself to be an expert on women, but I have noticed that a lot of them don’t find money, fame, and power to be unattractive traits in a man. So Tiger probably has a lot more women lining up for a chance to spend some private time with him than most of us could imagine having to deal with.

Plus, Tiger travels. A lot. All over the world. I can’t remember the last time I even left Houston County by myself, and I certainly don’t spend time traveling solo to exotic locations all over the world the way Tiger does.

So here you have a rich, powerful man whose work calls for him to spend a lot of time away from home who undoubtedly has beautiful women aggressively seeking to start up a relationship with him under any circumstances that he finds convenient. How many men do you think would fall prey to the same type of shenanigans he apparently engaged in under similar circumstances?

I’m sure we’d all like to think we’d stay on the straight and narrow and come home to our supermodel wife and perfect children untainted by the touch of other women if we were Tiger. But can you know that, for sure, not having faced the same temptations that he has?

Science and common sense suggest that you shouldn’t assume that you’re a better man than Tiger unless you’ve walked his path. Most of us never will, of course. But maybe we should be a little less eager to cast stones at people whose sins are just a little more sensational and newsworthy than our own.