[Paracelsus]

(05-29-2017 04:06 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

I wonder if guys whose parents have decided they will be sports stars as kids, and raised up and trained with that in mind, living, breathing, and eating their sports all throughout their childhood have essentially been denied their childhood, and are more likely than most to blow up their lives when they grow up.

...

I just wonder. Do people who can't really play and explore and mess around when they are young, people who have been forced to grow up too soon, do they end up seeking a kind of childhood, or make up for lost high school years for the rest of their lives?

The cliche is that parents often hide a desire to live through the kid behind publicly asserting that they're just "making sure the kid maximises his potential." And you have correctly identified one of the major downsides of this ubermensch approach to parenting.

My feeling is that when you push a kid to build his sense of worth around a single thing, something physical that he does which other people like to watch him doing, you remove many of the building blocks of the kid's personality. You set the kid up for narcissism, because the kid then makes his entire identity about that skill and nothing else. I suspect having a gifted kid is a lot more difficult than people think, because not only does the kid have to cope with being mindblowingly better than anyone else around him at a particular skill, but the parent has to successfully walk the balance between supporting the kid and making sure he doesn't throw all his personality down the fame hole.

I see much the same thing you do from a fair tranche of sports stars across disciplines in Australia. Swimming seems to be rife with it: in Australia, Kieren Perkins, Grant Hackett are two of the more well-known examples, guys who get to the end of their swimming careers when they're still "fit" around 30 or so but then crave the highs, the attention, and more importantly, the identity as a powerful swimmer. The sport hooks kids in from an early age, requires extreme commitment to get to the top, and you're done at a relatively early age as well ... even if your body is still in perfect shape and you aren't suffering physical breakdowns, a 36 year old swimmer simply cannot compete against a 26 year old.

Tiger Woods is a male case of those fucking sad cases of kids who compete in kids' dance competitions or child pageants. No difference. His father pushed him and trained him almost from infancy in golf. (Side note: the father's pathology is interesting. John T Reed points out that Tiger famously learned to play golf from his father. Where did his father get all that time to train him to a decent level in golf? From being a career Army officer; there's a shitload of golf courses on US Army bases, and career Army types like to make copious use of them.) It seems to me that he's been basically told -- or has internalised, which is worse -- that unless he is the #1 in golf, unless he is a successful golfer, he is a worthless individual. Or worse still, he is not an individual at all.

As for Tiger's overall pathology and what he's going through now, well, TLP has the breakdown again:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/12/i...art_1.html

Quote:

Question: why would any of these women sleep with Tiger Woods?

"Well, because he's TigerWoods. Maybe they do it for the story, for their ego; maybe they do it because they think he might give them gifts or money; maybe they think he might marry them..."

So it couldn't possibly be because they like him? That had they not known about his fame and money, they still would have gone to bed with him?

"Of course not. Not those girls."

I see. Do you think he doesn't know that?

II.

Assume Tiger was not married. Describe the woman you think would love him "for him." For whom Tiger's fame and wealth plays no part at all, who would have loved him even if he was a shoe salesman. Which modeling agency would she have been with? Oh.

Would Elin Nordegren have married him if he was just Tiger Woods, not TigerWoods?

What do you think Tiger Woods thinks?

III.

Would these women have slept with him if he was half as rich and half as famous? How about 1/4? At what point would he have been insufficiently rich or famous for them?

Yet it is entirely safe to assume these women have slept with other men who were neither famous nor rich. So why did Tiger have to be TigerWoods to get them?

Do you think Tiger Woods doesn't wonder this?

Stop reading here. You should go get a glass of water. Take a nap, watch a music video, there's a catchy one I quite like by Akon/David Guetta. Come back when you've thought this through.

IV.

It may, or may not, be true that these women are golddiggers, "whores", or only interested in him because he is famous; but it is absolutely a fact that these women could be seduced by a man who isn't famous or rich.

The reason this is absolutely, incontrovertibly a fact is that these women are human beings. They have the same general needs-- love, lust, attractions, loneliness, childhood dramas... Different things make them happy, in different ways.

Tiger Woods does not seem to know this. He seems to think what every guy has at least once said: "she only wants a [adj] guy..."

Taken to the inevitable conclusion, Tiger Woods needed one billion dollars in order to think a woman would want him. In order to get those women, he [thought] had to be TigerWoods, not Tiger Woods.

This means that no matter who/how many women he sleeps with, he will never be satisfied, because he has tricked them. He wants them to like him, but he knows they only like TigerWoods. That would be okay if he was just after the sex, he'd have a one night stand and disappear; but instead, he tries to forge loose relationships that are based on him pretending to be his image. This always fails.

The question isn't how he could have cheated with ten women; the question is how he managed to keep it under 100.

Va.

"But if I say I'm a doctor, she'll want to sleep with me." No, that only works on patients.

Vb.

No, I'm not kidding. I'm not saying she has to be your patient...


VI.

"As a woman, what I want to know is why he would ruin what looks like a perfect marriage to a beautiful woman, he has two kids with her... why would he risk all that on cocktail waitresses, no matter how attractive they are?"

Oddly, no man ever asks this question. It's not because he knows the answer: he doesn't. "Well, if I was TigerWoods, I'd probably do the same thing." That's interesting, you didn't say you'd do the same, you said you'd do the same if you were TigerWoods. "No, I mean in the same situation as him." You mean the one in which you're a billionaire golfer married to a swimsuit model? Or do you mean if you were just a regular guy?

"But it wouldn't happen to me if I was a regular guy, it would only happen to someone like TigerWoods."

That is exactly what Tiger Woods thinks, too.

VII.

"I hate your cryptic, self-indulgent wanderings."

No one can be told what the Matrix is.

VIII.

A woman asks why a man risks his marriage because she's seeing it from the other side: what else could this nut want?

They think what he wants is something. What he wants is to be seen as something.

This is what every man and a certain kind of woman asked in 1998: "Bill Clinton was President, he could have had any woman he wanted, he chose Monica Lewinsky?" No, he had to become President to be able to get Monica. That's the size of the power differential that was necessary for him to feel relaxed and confident that a woman liked him. If he had tried to get someone like, say, Cameron Diaz (who was also famous at that time for doing nearly nothing) he would be thinking, "oh my God, this woman can totally see I'm a dweeb."

At some point in the relationship of TigerWoods and ElinNordegren he felt himself become Tiger Woods to her. It is irrelevant whether or not this was true for her; in his eyes, she was seeing Tiger Woods. Why would a swimsuit model with a likely prior history of adequate penises get horny over a guy with a flabby belly?

"Doesn't he love her anymore?" Of course he does. She doesn't love him, not like she used to. She doesn't lust for him.

"How do you know that?" I don't need to know it, Tiger thinks it. If it took one billion dollars to get her interested in him, how much is it going to take to keep her interested in him, at the same intensity? It's impossible.

"That's crazy. Who thinks like that?"

Tiger Woods. Et al.

That's the problem with living in an era of narcissism. Even if you aren't one, you're not sure about anyone else.


IX.

"The best thing he can do is go on Oprah, admit his mistakes, maybe go into therapy to try to figure out what makes him cheat..."

He was with several women multiple times over many years. He didn't make a mistake, he didn't stray, that's who he is. You don't get to say who you are, your behavior speaks for you.

Trying to understand why he "cheated" or "strayed" or "made mistakes" is bad faith. Those behaviors aren't deviations from his normal, those are his normal. You can't isolate a behavior and unhook it from the overall self. "I'm not a bad person, but I do cheat sometimes." No, you are a bad person. The behavior is your business, but you don't get to commandeer the language.

And that's where Woods was about 7-8 years ago. Tiger Woods is now 41, i.e. no longer able to claim he's a young adult. He's had to retire from golf, he's had four back surgeries, possibly an addiction to painkillers, and got half his shit taken out by a wife who hasn't got the decency to hit the Wall or take up with bikies or something or otherwise act out her regret over the breakup of the marriage. With that many narcissistic injuries it's completely unsurprising if his decisionmaking skills are a bit off.