Tiger Woods is the best golfer on Planet Earth. I am one of the worst. So unlike Tiger, I know what it’s like to swing at a golf ball and completely miss it.

After his public apology on Friday, Tiger now knows what it’s like to completely swing and miss — at least metaphorically. May he learn and grow from the experience like the rest of us.

I’ve been resisting writing because, hey, what else is there to say? Every single pundit who gets paid to share their opinion has already done so, covering all the possible bases, and for those of us who do it for free — hey, we have lives over here.

But before the “historic” moment passes, I wanted to pass along a few thoughts:

• First of all, why ‘swing and miss?’ Because if he was going to go to the trouble of giving a public apology, he should have been willing to take questions. I train people to take questions for a living, and believe me, it’s not that hard to get ready. If Tiger can learn how to use a sand wedge, he can practice taking hostile questions. Be a man fer chrissake, Tiger.
• Also why swing and miss? Because the whole thing sounded like a guy trying to save his corporate bacon. Jeez Tiger, you’re in your 30s and already a multi-gazillion-aire. Do you really need more sponsors and commercials? What if he had said, “I don’t need another sponsor in my life. From now on, my foundation is my sponsor. So there. I’m going to be myself.”
• If you want to read the best dissection of the speech, go here — Bill Simmons on ESPN.com.
• I thought he sounded like the script was written by his therapists, and that he hadn’t been outside that cocoon in weeks. He sounded brainwashed, and like a dried-out alcoholic who “has seen the light” and now thinks that promising to follow the straight-and-narrow is the same as actually doing it. Believe me, Tiger, you WILL be tempted to screw gorgeous women who aren’t your wife again. I wouldn’t make any blanket promises if I were you.
• And on the last point: exactly who was hurt by Tiger’s sexual excesses? Not the wife, who knew his history before she married him and will now live free from want the rest of her life. Not the kids: they’re way too young, they’re kids of a celebrity, they’ll get over it. Not the sponsors, not the babes, not his mom (he’s a grown man, mom), not his dad (sorry, he’s dead and can’t feel anything).
• Really, only the PGA tour and his fellow golfers (whose sport is less interesting when he’s not playing) are truly damaged in this, and that’s the one group still getting screwed (sorry, no pun intended) because Tiger indicated he wasn’t done self-flaggalating so he won’t be playing golf anytime soon. i don’t feel the least bit sorry for them, but if you’re looking for victims, they are in fact right at the top of the list (sorry, I don’t think the wife was a victim. Naive, yes. But a victim, uh, no).

Now that the stories about Tiger Woods have descended from “marital woes” to “all out sex/party maniac,” I think Tiger needs a new strategy:

Tiger should go full-steam ahead and plant his flag as “the new Hugh Hefner,” or in my shorthand (trademark pending), “The New Hugh.”

I’m serious here.

Hugh Hefner has made a bloody fortune screwing beautiful women and leading the party life. But he’s ooollllddd. I can’t believe he’s still going strong, supposedly.

Hugh ain’t gonna last forever. We need a new role model, a new Adonis to do all the things we dream about: Tiger.

He’s incredibly handsome.

He’s incredibly rich.

He’s one of the greatest athletes in the world.

He’s one of the greatest commercial pitchmen in the world.

He’s perfect.

Go for it, my man.  Stock your mega-yacht Privacy with hot-and-cold running hotties, Cristal and pate, enjoy it and cash in on it.

You have nothing left to lose.

So it turns out that Tiger Woods has been a carousing, hard partying guy, both as a bachelor and as a married man. In essence, this doesn’t surprise me one bit — in fact, it makes a lot more sense than the partial stories that were coming out the first week about his “transgressions.” I believe that one of the unexplored tensions in our society is the tamping down and frowning upon mens’ natural desires for the attention of women.

What does stun me is all the media and sponsor handwringing and clucking that has ensued now that the stories about Tiger’s wild party life have burst into the open. Where were you, golf media, when Tiger had a bottle of Cristal in one hand and a babe on each arm? Were you partying along with him? Were you up in your rooms playing Nintendo? Or were you just flat out clueless?

And sponsors, starting with Accenture: you mean to tell me that you didn’t check out Tiger’s behavior before or while you employed him? You didn’t do any due diligence to find out if the image you were buying was real? And you want me to trust you (Accenture) with my corporate consulting work?

It seems clear to me that the media, sponsors and the PGA tour all turned a blind eye toward Tiger’s behavior, for one good ‘ol fashioned reason: money. The man has made billions for all the parties above, boosting ratings and selling soap. He was their cash cow, their golden goose. To call him on his behavior would have been commercial suicide.

I understand that too. But spare me the holier-than-thou statements now generally along the lines of “we didn’t know” or “he doesn’t represent the right image for us.” Puh-leeze. How about “we knew all along but we didn’t say anything, so we share the blame for this unfortunate situation, and we’ll do a better job next time.”

PS — And then there’s his wife, Elin Nordegren. She knew before she married Tiger that he was a major ladies man, yet she jumped on the gravy train as well. Here’s People mag, via the NY Daily News:

Nordegren’s friends tell People she knew about Woods’ extracurricular activities but that he promised before their marriage that he would change.

“Elin had talked to other golfers and their wives about Tiger’s wild parties,” a friend told the magazine. “When she asked Tiger about it, he said he would stop doing it. And she believed him. But he never did.”

One of the more interesting things that has been said about Tiger Woods  is that now he is “human like the rest of us.” This is undoubtedly true, though quite painful for him and us to live through this week. We all have our human failings — can you imagine coming to terms with yours under the spotlight he has been under this week?

When you think about it, though, it’s pretty obvious that Tiger had some learnin’ to do. He was raised to be a golf-playing robot by his parents, and by his teenage years, was playing golf at the highest levels of the sport. Before long, he was earning millions playing golf, practicing golf and dealing with sponsors. When did he have time to learn about life?

Somewhere this week, I read a quote from him, via his girlfriend, that he complained of being unhappy in his married life and that being a husband and a father “wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.” I should have saved the link, because now I can’t find it.

What Tiger has fallen victim to is known as a super-replicator — a belief that we as humans transmit among each other regardless of its factuality, because to not do so might imperil our very existence.

What was this belief? That marriage and children bring happiness to the lives of adults.

It’s not that there aren’t many aspects of marriage and parenting that are pleasurable, but the reality is that in many moments, being married or raising children isn’t as fun, as, say, having sex with a hot cocktail waitress.

But if our society didn’t pass along the “marriage and children equal happiness” super-replicator, then what would happen? Fewer marriages and children — which is why our failure to pass it along threatens our very existence.

So people coo at babies, say things like, “you must be so happy!” and generally send adults the message that, in fact, parenting = happiness. The problem with this is that in the moment that you are up to your eyeballs in diapers or dead tired from chasing the kids, you don’t understand why you aren’t as happy as everyone says you are supposed to be. And that’s where the trouble starts.

For most of us, there are safe ways to reconcile the disparity between the super-replicator and our own experience. We talk with friends, we observe other people, and we generally make it through. Of course, some people turn to booze, drugs, gambling, affairs and the like, as well.

For Tiger, though, he likely hasn’t had anyone to share his feelings with, to try to square what he was feeling with what the world was telling him. He got together with his wife in his late-twenties, she was a knockout blonde, what’s the problem? We get married, we start a family, life’s good. Only when it turns out that Elin is a real person, and that being married isn’t all romance and hot sex, and that having babies isn’t all cute photo ops, Tiger likely had no safety net.

I’m also guessing that despite his Joe-cool exterior, Tiger is a pretty immature, undeveloped guy. Which would explain why he would be comfortable with cocktail waitresses who demanded little of him and likely allowed him to “be himself.” The gorgeous blonde, Swedish wife was who Tiger thought he ought to be married to, in order to live out the super-replicator life that he thought he was supposed to live. Hanging out with cocktail waitresses was probably closer to the real life he was ready to live.

*****

Where did I get all the stuff above? Mainly from reading a great book called “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert. It’s about the reality of what does or might make us happy versus what we think will make us happy. I highly recommend it.

As it happens, I found a blogger who liberally quoted from the section of the book that deals with the concept of super-replicators. Here is the key quote:

“Children bring happiness” is a super-replicator. The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.

Uh-oh. It turns out that where there was Thanksgiving Day smoke, there was definitely fire. Tiger Woods has been caught red-handed being a philandering adulterer. Goodbye pristine reputation, maybe goodbye marriage.

But is it goodbye golf game and goodbye endorsements? No and probably not.

Woods issued another statement today, this time saying he “let my family down and I regret those transgressions.” [Full text of Tiger Woods' statement here.]

But just as Tiger redefined golf, he may be in the process of redefining celebrity scandal-mongering. His statement goes on to say:

No matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy… Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.

That’s right. He hasn’t been accused of using performance-enhancing drugs, betting on the game, animal cruelty or physical violence. Those are the types of things that derail sports careers.

He’s one of the world’s sexiest men, he probably had and has woman propositioning him constantly, and he took some of them up on it, even after he was married. That makes him a fool and a cad, but that’s all. No evidence yet that he paid for it, a la Eliot Spitzer, who after all was an elected official, and a sanctimonious one at that. Unless this saga goes into one of the above-mentioned areas, I think it tarnishes him but doesn’t really afffect his public life.

Further, I really like that he shot back at the media mongrels who are demanding more information and confessionals. Tough. If you want information, go dig it out. He owes you absolutely nothing.

As the Tiger Woods car accident story was becoming known and starting to be covered in the media, my other half passed along an article talking about “what Tiger should do,” and suggesting that I weigh in. In the moment, I have to say that I had a hard time forming a strategy, partly due to Thanksgiving overload and partly because I was at a loss as to what I would recommend.

In the meantime, on Sunday, Tiger released a statement that, I thought, hit all the right notes.

Here’s the statement:

As you all know, I had a single-car accident earlier this week, and sustained some injuries. I have some cuts, bruising and right now I’m pretty sore.

This situation is my fault, and it’s obviously embarrassing to my family and me. I’m human and I’m not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn’t happen again.

This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.

The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false.

This incident has been stressful and very difficult for Elin, our family and me. I appreciate all the concern and well wishes that we have received. But, I would also ask for some understanding that my family and I deserve some privacy no matter how intrusive some people can be.

Here’s what I like about the statement and the strategy it implies:

1. He gives some helpful details at the beginning
2. He shifts the story back to its core — a single-car accident, mostly on private property, minor injuries, my fault. He went on the offense instead of playing defense.
3. He clearly states and repeats that he wants his privacy, as would any of us, famous or not, in such a case involving a minor accident.
4. He praises his wife, signaling a united front with her.

The fact is, none of us — the general public, his fans, the police or the media — really needs more information about this situation. I think the police acted irresponsibly in showing up at his house twice for an interview, thereby giving TV a fresh shot to air, when they could have called on the phone and been told whether or not he would speak to them. It looked to me like the cops were seeing this case as a possible gravy train rather than focusing on doing their jobs.

Is Tiger having an affair? Was his wife whacking him with a golf club as he ran out of the house and jumped in his car? Who knows? If you care, go to TMZ.com and get your fill.

Here’s a blessedly sane media story with the headline “Tiger doesn’t owe us an explanation.”