The greatest golfer to ever live stands slightly slouched in a tight white polo shirt, his face bearing a sphinxlike expression. To his left, a beautiful blond woman is beaming in a tank top and jeans. Their arms are around each other in the kind of pose that conveys couplehood. Behind them, strands of ivy creep up an anonymous white wall. The greatest golfer to ever live — or perhaps his P.R. team, posting this on his official Instagram page — has captioned the photo: “Love is in the air and life is better with you by my side! We look forward to our journey through life together. At this time we would appreciate privacy for all those close to our hearts.”
And with that, they were Instagram Official. This way station comes long before the courthouse or the church, but it is no trivial thing; it is a crucial part of how we love today. Sometimes we “soft launch” a relationship with intriguing photos of a could-be paramour, as ambiguous as a mid-Atlantic spring. Sometimes we lock things down with a beatific “hard launch,” with ivy growing behind. That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re looking forward to your journey through life, together.
The pronouns in this particular announcement experience a telling shift. At first, the greatest golfer to ever live seems to be addressing his partner (“life is better with you by my side!”), but then the couple are addressing us all, collectively, regarding their future (“we look forward to our journey through life”), and then they seem to be telling us to leave them alone (“privacy for all those close to our hearts”). But how could we leave them alone after this? When Tiger Woods starts dating Vanessa Trump, the ex-wife of the current president’s son Donald Trump Jr., and announces it with a borderline avant-garde Instagram post that has, as of this writing, more than half a million likes and 10,000-plus comments, it’s the sort of thing that’s going to make news, even in times such as these.
Woods and Trump were reportedly dating for months — those of us who spend too much time in the hothouse of the golf world had heard gossip — but something obviously spurred them to make it public. Comments on the post ran the gamut from the congratulatory to the conspiratorial. Ivanka Trump co-signed the announcement by commenting that she was happy for them. Snoop Dogg said, “Check ya d m,” with tiger and golf emojis. There were comments about how the post is confusing (in fairness, it is) and how it seemed weird to request privacy in a public announcement (in fairness, it was). Some suggested that either Vanessa or ChatGPT had written the post (on the logic that Tiger wouldn’t say things like “Love is in the air”); others thought he had been hacked or was being held hostage. Some cracked wise about Woods’s having a type (blondes); others wanted him to win another major (improbable, but it would be awesome). There were copious goat emojis. Many people didn’t care but were moved to comment as much (they care). Others seemed sincerely happy for the couple.
Special attention should be paid to the almost delusional plea for privacy. This has long been a fetish of Woods’s. He bought a yacht called Privacy, which truly signals intent. And yet, above and beyond his world-historic golf achievements, stuff has occurred; I’m probably not breaking any major news in your consciousness when I stipulate that Woods’s personal life has occasionally been messy. There was the time Elin Nordegren, who was then his wife, bashed out the back window of his S.U.V. amid a chaotic incident that reportedly involved her discovery of an affair. (Later reports would suggest there had been a lot of them.) There was the time he was pulled over in Florida and assured some unpersuaded police officers that he was in California. There was the terrifying 2021 auto accident when he actually was in California and sped off a winding road while driving around 85 miles per hour, shattering one of his already oft-injured legs. Woods is one of the largest-ever beneficiaries of sports’s image-making age, using his charisma to sign endorsement deals with brands including Rolex and Nike — but he may also be among that era’s victims.
To be clear, I am a Tiger Woods partisan. No athlete in my lifetime has better defined excellence or brought me more thrills. I’ve watched him win a major on a busted leg, lap distinguished fields at classic courses and hole-out a chip shot on the 16th hole at the Masters, his ball hesitating at the edge of the cup as if making sure to display its Nike logo before rolling in. Friends have asked how I can root for him after so many episodes of unpleasant behavior. What can I say? I still root for Mick Jagger too.
