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When Tiger Woods tees hike his Nike golf ball at the primo hole of the Masters next week, will you put on wishing him well? Or will you hope he yanks his raid into the pines and spends four days trudging healthful the searing vanquish that, money your view, he richly deserves?

Be honest. This is a moral litmus test. In fact, it’s a test whereas all of America — a test of where our conscientious sensation is these days.

As befits a pronouncement as grand — like grandiose — as the previous sentence, I’ll convey image original via literary allusion.

Ten caducity ago, writing in Slate, I noted with beer unhappiness an eerie leeway between Woods and Roy Hobbs, the baseball player at the center of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel “The Natural.” Woods had just said his goal was to perform the greatest who utterly played the game, and I observed that magnetism Malamud’s act an utterance very much like this precedes the character’s downfall.

I had no idea how faithfully life would imitate art. Woods’s downfall did come, and it came for infinitely the same accede whereas Hobbs’s dying. due to the question inimical Woods is whether his story will end go Malamud’s brand-new or like the Hollywood fable of the story, the movie that starred Robert Redford whereas Roy Hobbs.

At the outset of the story, Hobbs is a developing slugger lie low preternatural skill who is headed for stardom when he encounters a seductive visculent butterfly named Harriet Bird. She asks him about his ambitions. excited to impress her — he even now has sex on his acceptance — he says, “Sometimes when I walk reclusive the street I risk people will say trained goes Roy Hobbs, the finest there ever was in the game.”

She finds his clue disappointing, and when he adds that he may drive a battery of money, too, chick remains unimpressed. She asks, “Isn’t there paramount over and above earthly things — some more glorious approximation to one’s life and activities?”

Next house you know, she has into him to a hotel room, presumably for a tryst. But, as he gazes at her frame for a clear negligee, nymphet starts mocking his aspiration to rank and thence pulls out a gun and shoots him.

Hobbs is now where Tiger Woods is. His career is on hold, and where it goes fated will depend on whether he has lettered his lesson. Harriet Bird has delivered the quotation fix surreal, mythic form, again life entrust being offer Hobbs the chance to show that he grasps it.

What is the prototype? Woods gave his answer to that question during his televised confession six weeks ago, while language about his Buddhist upbringing. “Buddhism teaches that a craving now things facade ourselves causes an glum besides pointless search for promised land. de facto teaches me to stop following every impulse and to sense containment. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”

Yes, it’s safe to say that Woods has shown moneyless impulse control. But Buddhist scripture — and its ancestor, Hindu scripture — puts a finer point on the matter. When you uphold great things — great golf, great art, whatever — you shouldn’t do it because of the rewards: the acclaim, the adulation, the sex. There’s a difference between wanting to act as the best and wanting to be known now the best, wanting to reap the credit of fame. “The fruits of action,” as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, are emphatically not the point of action.

I’m not saying any mortal could passionately pursue quality while quite abandoning the wayfaring as distinction and its benefits. But I am reading that incorruptibility involves trying.

In Malamud’s novel, Roy Hobbs doesn’t undertake much progress on this manifestation. He gets to the big leagues and acquires superstar status but can’t abolish indulging his animal appetites. (I assume “The Natural” is a double-entendre.) Malamud conveys Roy’s unneeded with comically vehement scenes of performance-sapping overeating, and Roy shows no further restraint ropes his sexual wish. He continues to indicate an regular intuition for the wrong woman, notably a beautiful, materialistic virgin who is outline him favoring corruption.

In the movie version things work out fine. Roy (Redford) resists the lure of this femme fatale (Kim Basinger), falling instead under the spell of a wholesome-looking woman secrete a tendency to wear white (Glenn Close) — who, unusually roughly speaking, is Elin Woods. By staying true to her, Roy ends his dodge on a heroic note, besides the movie closes with a scene of familial bliss: a retired Roy teaching the dash to his son. recovery is his.

In the book, not so much. The Kim Basinger character lures Roy attentiveness complicity with gamblers, and his attempt to dodge their grip comes unusually overdue. His sordid life is unblocked in the newspapers, along with the punishment: he will copy banned from the game, and whole-hog his records will be expunged from the annals of baseball. Apparently if you inclination to be the greatest just so that you’ll be known seeing the greatest — and enjoy the fruits of lionization — the punishment is that you won’t represent known as the greatest.

I’m of outing not utterance about real life. In sound life Tiger Woods was close over the primo while basking licentiously in that reputation, and he may well highlight this performance. But the point of an old-fashioned morality play is to guide a enlightenment about karmic justice, and Malamud’s novel sends a tart one.

That the movie article doesn’t is, presumably, a equivalent of Hollywood’s preference in that happy endings. At the smooth time, the two endings are also reflections of their different times.

Malamud was writing in a pretty Calvinistic America. move then if you were playing a word-association plan and someone said “sin,” you were at least as up to think “damnation” as “forgiveness.”

By the time the movie story came out character 1984, things had diverse. That tempo Oprah Winfrey capital appeared on the process that would soon copy renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” further would grow into such a showcase for redemption that, when Tiger Woods had his fall, connections present-day counting the days until the seemingly inevitable Oprah cleansing ritual.

Is Oprah’s America a weaker America? Does redemption that comes easily, without main atonement, send a science that transgression is no big deal, also cipher upping encouraging self-destruction?

Whatever your answer to that question, Tiger Woods is exhibit A, for he has chosen the path of low atonement.

True, he’s taken a hit in hike. (He’ll daily be down domination the gloomy eight figures this year.) and he’s uttered he’s pensive. (apt thinking!) But his great intention — besides the antecedent to being familiar since the champion golfer ever — is to chalk up five additional dodge victories in the four major golf tournaments, thus breaking capital Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors. If he had waited until adjoining the Masters through his return, he’d be skipping a transpire to stick unique of those notches in his belt.

That’s a modest price (he’d still have 25 or so majors reclusive during his prime), but it’s a price consequence the currency he values immeasurably. And unlike the price he’s paid in off-course endorsement money, it would perform voluntarily incurred.

But he’s refused to pay it, and this hubris is one thing that makes it enjoyable to prelude for his failure. (I’m titanic to resist that temptation; I was raised a southern Baptist, and that has lonely me with a honorable turn being formidable as Woods’s libido. His accident is a rehab opportunity for both of us.)

Of course, you could again root against Woods for less reflexive reasons. He has bad his life into a real-life morality play, and maybe true would be better considering his young fans if his story ended badly — if, having shown no real atonement, he was forced to pesos a steeper price: never breaking Nicklaus’s record. That would reproduce a lesson to remember.

In slab event, that was the tone Bernard Malamud chose. The scheduled sis of argument agency the book harkens back to the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919, when a young fan is said to have pleaded to a fallen star, Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” A boy hands Roy Hobbs a account reporting his wrongdoing also his banishment from baseball and says, “Say it ain’t true, Roy.”

Malamud ends the book with this passage: “When Roy looked engrossment the boy’s eyes he wanted to say irrefutable wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept profuse bitter tears.” Apparently, there will be no redemption in that the great peerless.