Colin Sheridan: Will the neat Tiger Woods narrative give us a fitting third act?

Tiger Woods and son Charlie fist bump on the 18th hole during the final round of the PNC Championship at the Ritz Carlton Golf Club last December. The golfing superstar seemed to have got his life and career back on track after years of struggle on and off the course.

Mon, 01 Mar, 2021 - 07:00

Colin Sheridan is a writer and columnist. A former officer in the Irish Defence Forces he has extensive deployment experience as a peacekeeper with the United Nations, having lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine.

So, to begin at the end, we have the oft misquoted line from F Scott Fitzgerald: “There are no second acts in American lives.”

Au contraire, Scottie, au contraire. America, it can be argued, has been the most forgiving of societies when it comes to epic falls from grace; Cassius Clay, Robert Downey Jnr, Ray Rice, its current president Joseph Biden. It — the country, its media and consumers — love nothing better than a second act, a comeback. Fitzgerald, it should be noted, fulfilled his own misquoted prophecy; he was dead at 44, broken by a life of sporadic brilliance and incessant excess. There was no second act for him, or for his tortured wife Zelda, who died in a fire within the hospital she was a patient of, aged 48.